Debut author Jack Mackay creates hauntings to help characters grow

Good ghost stories usually include a spooky haunted house, spirits, and the menacing symbols and events. A great ghost story contains all of these elements plus primary characters whose needs are woven into the fabric of their fears. Author Jack Mackay does this in his debut novel Gloam.

                Photo credit Ayesha Brown

 This talented United Kingdom writer creates a novel of depth as he traces the story of Gwen and her three siblings whose stepdad moves them to the siblings’ grandmother’s abandoned house on the island of Gloam based on the real island of Lindisfarne “which most people just call Holy Island,” where the primary causeways are only accessible during low tide. As Mackay describes it, “It’s much more vibrant than Gloam, and much less bleak than Gloam. It’s actually quite a nice place, but it does have this really long, muddy causeway leading right up to it.”

Stuck on the island while stepdad Henry works on the mainland, Gwen finds herself and siblings watched under the “hungry eyes and too sharp teeth” of babysitter Esme. Gwen, who helped to nurse her mother as she died of cancer while also helping with her brother Roger and the twins and doesn’t feel the need of a sitter, recognizes this sitter is a threatening presence even as Roger and the twins warm up to her. It’s up to Gwen to divide and conquer as she helps her siblings see the way Esme feeds on the children’s fears. After all, she promised her dying mom she’d take care of everyone, including Henry, her stepdad. With this vow, Gwen is determined to save her stepdad and siblings from the monsters of their nightmares and to banish Esme so that this abandoned house can once again become a home.

Esme feeds on the children’s fears and, as rot soon takes over the walls of the house, Gwen must protect her siblings and help them to recognize that Esme is as monstrous as their worst nightmares.

In doing so, readers are captured by the story of a family who has experienced the death of their mother and who must now rely on Henry, a stepdad who was an only child and never had children until he married their mother. While his intentions are loving and noble, he’s overwhelmed with his efforts to take care of the kids.

Mackay says the true joy of writing in the horror genre is that writers can take on some of the most difficult topics kids face in life and guide them through the dark side of life. He says, “[T]here are things happening in life, and that children are aware of, but they sort of lack the language to maybe understand articulately. And I think that horror fiction is a great way for kids to explore some things that they might not otherwise get to explore.”

Mackay explains, “I was a big, scaredy cat when I was a kid, so if you’d have asked me then what appeals to you about horror, I’d have said nothing.

But I think, as I got older, I started to become quite fascinated by what I was scared by, and it sort of developed into this morbid fixation of ‘this thing’s really frightening, and I can’t stop reading it, or I can’t stop like, you know, looking it up on Wikipedia and reading about it.’ And I think that children are very much drawn to things that they feel are maybe transgressive or thrilling, or, you know, is opening a door that they might not otherwise see into in other aspects of their life. And I think as a writer, now that I’m older and adult now…I love the horror genre because of what you can get away with, and…the kind of stories you can tell, and the kind of themes you can write about in horror are just so there’s basically no holds barred.”

Mackay studied English at The University of York and was heavily involved in theatre productions there. Today he’s a founding member of Griffonage Theatre, a York-based company “with a taste for the madcap and macabre.” The combination of literature and  theatre informed much of the action readers will find in Gloam. As Mackay says of his theatrical influences, he describes director Guillermo del Toro, writer of Pan’s Labrynth as someone who had a lifelong affinity for monsters. “He said, that he’s going to sort of have a lifelong affinity for monsters, and…he described them as living symbols, and I thought that that was just such a lovely way to think about them.” For Mackay, this translated to each of the kids inner needs. “[T]hese monsters that represent something about the interiority of these kids, and it was this sort of inner turmoil, sort of expressed physically in a monstrous form.”

There’s a scene in Gloam when Gwen recalls something her grandmother said, “Fear is a good thing. You can only be brave if you’re afraid. Children should be frightened of monsters. How else will you know when to fight them?”

For Mackay, the joy of writing this novel for middle graders is “the fear in that insurmountable challenge. And then the joy of the story is, as with so much of children’s horror—it was always the stuff that drew me to things like Goosebumps and things like that—is the fact that kids band together and they have to do it themselves. They have to rely on their own agency and their own powers to sort of make a difference and sort of take that power back.”

Ann Angel