Despite growing up with few books in her home, CJ Cooke has been writing since she was young. Today, she is best known for her contemporary Gothic novels The Lighthouse Witches, The Nesting and her new title The Ghost Woods.
Belfast-born CJ Cooke spoke to The Courier from her home in Glasgow, where she lives with her husband and four children and works as a reader in creative writing. She recalls regular visits to her local library as a child. “I was just bored,” she recalls, “we didn’t have anything to do. I don’t think we had a TV until I was eight. The library was a reprieve and it was exciting to have books.
“My mum got me a subscription to The Storyteller, a magazine that came with a cassette tape. Some of the stories were very dark and quite savage!” She recalls tales by Oscar Wilde and a “super-scary” Japanese fairy tale which may well have been the beginning of her love for gothic stories. “I don’t think you could get that now for children!” she muses.
The Ghost Woods certainly doesn’t shy away from dark subject matter. Set in 1965, it tells the story of Pearl Gorham who was sent to a mother and baby home in the Scottish Borders. Whilst there, she meets a mysterious young mother and her son and joins with them to try to unravel the secrets of Lichen Hall.
“I’ve always written about women’s lives,” says CJ, “my writing is feminist writing. I was also learning more about my own mum’s experiences – she was 17 when she had me. My daughter is 16 and you think about the world that you want for your daughters.
“I had heard about Mother and Baby homes [residential homes where unmarried mothers were sent to have their babies] but I didn’t know how prevalent they were.”
Once she had decided on the subject matter, CJ says that, “the characters came quite quickly off the page. You try to be guided by them and let them develop and see how they respond.”
“I think I have always been interested in books that deal with fear and with death,” says CJ, explaining that family bereavements she experienced as a child have focussed the need to write something that, “looks at fear and how we process death – religion can only do so much it looks at grief in terms of even the body and how the body holds grief.
Magical plots
The Gothic novel has given the writer the chance to indulge her own love of the genre, “the are gothic texts that I love and cherish,” she explains but also points out that she hesitated from writing Gothic for quite a long time. Now, she is fascinated by how far she can push her plots: “There are ways that you can encounter magic and fantastical realism,” she says. “The crossover between the surreal and the magical is really interesting and I am quite keen on seeing what a story can do in terms of believability.
“One of the children is the book is psychic and another theme is mushrooms and funghi. I was thinking about the Gothic a lot, the seasons and looking at how the dead sustains the living. I can’t think of a better example,” she points out.
The ins and outs of The Ghost Woods unsettled CJ enough to cause sleepless nights, which gives an indication of how her readers might find the story: “I think that’s a good thing or a good sign that something is unnerving me,” she says. “If it’s freaking me out it’s likely to freak out the reader too.”
Dundee bound
Looking ahead, her next book is set even further back in time, in Dundee in 1901. This time, she has taken inspiration from the whaling industry and divides her tale between the City of Discovery and Iceland.
The Ghost Woods, CJ Cooke, Harper Collins, £14.99.
