THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME
Liam Higginson
In Wales, where I grew up and still live now, we like to think of ourselves as a nation of storytellers. This is true, I think, but it’s always struck me as a little strange. It seems to me that human beings are a species of storytellers, and to claim a particular country loves stories is as redundant as noting the people there like to eat food. In fairness though, my sister and I were raised on stories. There were tales of our grandparents’ childhoods from south Wales to the northeast of England. There were books like The Hobbit and Moonfleet that my mum read to me at bedtime until long after I was too old to be read to. There were the hilarious sketches my dad would make up for us to pass the time on long car journeys, voices and all. These were the stories that made me as a person. After those came the books that made me as a writer. They all hold a special place in my heart for having had the biggest impact on The Hill in the Dark Grove, and are the ones that most shaped the style, tone, and content of my writing.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959
When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I developed a sudden appetite for horror stories. This is the story I think first and most clearly taught me that horror doesn’t have to be about monsters and gore, and is often at its most effective when it pulls on subtler, more psychological threads. The characters are interesting and relatable, but the house itself is of course the real standout. It’s not your traditional haunted house, populated by white-sheeted ghosties, but rather a house that feels heavy with a sense of profound wrongness. The layout of the rooms changes, for example, so you find yourself doubting what you’ve read. It feels ungraspable. Even manipulative. There’s a sense that each character is perhaps being shown different facets, or finding in the house what they desire or fear (this is an idea that really chills and fascinates me – Ray Bradbury’s 1944 short story The Jar also memorably explores this). An honourable mention goes to Mike Flanagan’s brilliant adaptation, which diverges significantly from the plot but preserves the tone and essence of Jackson’s story.
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods, 1992
I must have lightened up a bit when I reached my later teenage years, because I got really into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. He was just so good at skewering real-world issues in a funny, incisive, often poignant way that strips away all the cultural and social rules that often burden our critical engagement with these topics. On the Disc, we see the ridiculousness of our beliefs and institutions and prejudices taken to their logical conclusions. And best of all, they also work simply as entertaining fantasy stories. Small Gods takes aim at religion, with a mighty god, Om, finding himself transformed into a lowly tortoise. It’s a fantastic satire that deals with theological hypocrisy and corruption, blind faith, and the power of humble belief. There’s a passage early on that really stuck with me – the idea of small gods existing everywhere, right down to there being a god of the place where, say, two ant trails meet. I love that way of looking at the world.
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, 1997
This, along with Frazier’s equally brilliant but often overlooked Thirteen Moons, is the book I credit with making me want to write. I first read it when I was about eighteen and I’ve probably gone back to it half a dozen times since. Each time, in a different phase of my life, I find myself relating to it differently. It has a bit of everything. Frazier writes with such a strong sense of place and time – I’ve never visited the mountains of North Carolina, let alone during the 1860s, but I feel like I know them intimately. There are harrowing scenes of war, tragedy, and hardship, but also humour, companionship, and love both romantic and platonic. I really enjoy stories about ordinary people caught up by the currents of major historical events beyond their control. The central odyssey of the protagonist, Inman, feels at times folkloric, at times idyllic, at times apocalyptic. There’s a sense of longing, too, both here and in Thirteen Moons, for a remembered youth and home that perhaps never existed. Honourable mentions, in a similar vein, for Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Louis DeBernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, but Cold Mountain got to me first.
Stephen King, The Shining, 1977
I sometimes feel like I have to justify my admiration for King. He seems to be dismissed by many as a writer of pulpy schlock, and admittedly he has churned out a few duds (and a few infamous mentions of ‘jahoobies’ and other language that’s now unacceptable), but when he’s at his best it’s easy to see why he’s regarded as the undisputed master of the genre. The Shining is, in my opinion, his finest work. As with Jackson’s Hill House, the remote and haunted Overlook Hotel is the star of the show here. Empty for most of the novel, and cut off in the snowbound Colorado Rockies, it drips with liminal menace and foreboding, not so much a haunted house as the monster itself that slowly digests the caretaker and his family trapped within its walls. Jack’s descent into madness feels inevitable but, unlike in Kubrick’s adaptation, is drawn with flawed relatability. Wendy is the unsung hero, and little Danny is one of the best child characters I’ve ever read, knowing and dealing with far too much for his age. It’s tragic but ultimately hopeful, and every time I revisit it I wonder if it will somehow work out differently this time. Along with King’s almost-as-good Pet Sematary, and John Carpenter’s terrifying movie The Thing, it’s probably the book that had the most direct influence on Dark Grove.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 2015
I remember my wife and I taking turns to read this this aloud while the other cooked or did the washing up (something that’s since become one of our favourite activities – the reading aloud together, that is, not the washing up). Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple in an Anglo-Saxon Britain where the line between history and myth is as blurry as their fading memories, are immediately endearing as protagonists. Their deep but unostentatious devotion to one another is the novel’s heart and driving force. Their humble journey is like an antidote to the pomp and grandeur of an Arthurian quest – in the best way possible, it feels at times like Monty Python and the Holy Grail rewritten as a serious work of literature. Writing this makes me want to read it again immediately.
Liam Higginson, Author of The Hill in the Dark Grove
Fiction Book of the Month for January
