Guest post written by Diavola author Jennifer Thorne
Jennifer Thorne is the author of Lute, The Wrong Side of Right, The Inside of Out, Night Music, and (with Lee Kelly) The Antiquity Affair. American by birth, she now lives in rural England with her husband and two sons.
Diavola is a sharp twist on the classic haunted house story, exploring loneliness, belonging, and the seemingly inescapable bonds of family mythology.
Have you ever had a dream where you’re in a setting you know well, maybe your own house, your old school, a familiar city square—but there’s now something different about it? It could just be the vague droning sensation telling you that something is off. Or something more tangible: your house has a door off the kitchen you’ve never noticed before, and an entirely new room beyond. Your old school has broken windows and animals running through it. The city square is completely, eerily empty, and from there the strangeness mounts until—hey now, look out—your dream is now a nightmare.
Basically, that’s how I write horror.
Several years back, I took a truly incredible trip to Tuscany with my extended family—me, my husband, two kids, dad and stepmom, brother and sister-in-law, aunt, uncle and young cousin, two family friends. (I’m not kidding when I say “extended.”) The villa was spectacular, centuries old but outfitted with all the modern comforts, with ample rooms and sofas, cats and lizards roaming freely, a deep, cool swimming pool, and all this only a quick train ride from Florence. Everyone got along beautifully and now count the vacation among our favorite memories.
So of course, I decided to mess that up. With Diavola, I’ve given that lovely memory a toxic remix. In my novel, the smaller family gathering feels more claustrophobic, in that no one gets along, beautifully or otherwise. Every small moment of real-life irritation one might experience traveling with one’s family is amplified in this book into an untenable hostility among the dysfunctional Paces. And to that, I’ve added and amplified the memory of certain uncomfortable sensory details, the kind you would typically edit out of your mental postcard of “that amazing trip to Italy.” For example, it was a heatwave summer the year we actually went to Florence, mosquitoes swarming in abundance, red ants littering the pine needle minefield of a walk to the pool, all of which tipped the baseline disorientation of being a foreigner abroad into outright delirium. All of those elements are ripe for a horror novel, so into the mix they went.
And then there’s the architectural setting. The house itself I have described almost exactly as in life, for several reasons. One, it’s easier for me, and therefore more fun, to build a story on an existing foundation, to walk the halls of a place where I’ve already spent two weeks, to remember and then to change, corrupt it—add a tower, for example, and a malevolent ghost inside who wants to steal your soul. Two, I believe readers can sense the tangibility of an imagined space. The more real to me, the more real to you, and therefore all the more terrifying. And three, this place was all kinds of gothic. It cried out to be put onto the page.
In my first horror novel Lute, I adapted a different sort of space, an island I’ve always wanted to visit but still haven’t managed to set foot on except in my imagination—Lundy, in the Bristol Channel. Although the concept of the book came before I even knew about Lundy, once I discovered the island, it proved fertile ground for fresh ideas of eerie spaces, dark histories, and deadly traditions. While drafting, I relied on maps of the island, photographs, historical records, even tidal charts, grounding the fantastical in the completely mundane in order to make it feel real to me and therefore to the reader as well. Part of it was also wish-fulfilment—it’s devilishly hard to score a booking for a holiday cottage on Lundy, except years in advance, which is far too organized for me, and I really want to go there! So I have gone, in my mind, and my mind being my mind, I made it horrific. Readers have noted how real Lute feels to them as a setting, both ominous and endearing, and I’ve been especially gratified to hear from readers who have actually been to Lundy and who say that I captured it well in Lute. If I can get over my predilection for last-minute travel, I’ll one day visit myself and enjoy discovering what I got wrong and right. (Hopefully the whole “seven people dying on the same day every seventh summer” thing turns out to be wholly my own invention.)
Anna, the artist protagonist of Diavola, notes of Villa Taccola that the vacation rental has hints of “pentimenti”—traces of an original painting that has subsequently been painted over, once or several times. The process of writing is much like that. You take an initial vision and then revise it, add and remove, either purifying the story, or in the case of effective horror, corrupting it. The experience of reading includes experiencing all those layers to some degree, even the ones we think we’ve fully painted over. It’s that depth that makes a book setting come alive within a novel. So alive in fact, that it might later invade a reader’s mind, even cause them to have dreams about it—or, if I’ve really done my job well, nightmares, those little truths of an actual physical place inevitably bleeding through, creating the sensation that, by reading my books, you’ve been there yourself.
In my own way, that’s how I best honor the places I love most. After all, I’m not really messing up cherished memories or hoped-for destinations, only drawing the what-ifs those places evoke into satisfyingly full (and, yes, sometimes horrific) conclusions.
