Dwyer Murphy explains how to build a house (in your novel) ‹Literary hub

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I don’t know much about houses – build or maintain them. This reality appeared to me a few years ago when I decided to write a particular type of book, a modern Gothic novel on a group of friends convening in a coastal house after a long separation: The great thrillwith more bodies. A story like this requires a distinctive framework. The atmosphere, the suspense, all this would live or die on the floor plane; I needed to be able to describe this house in detail, to its bones.

(The book is now called The house on Buzzards BayAnd it will be released next month.)

A time ago, not so long ago, when I could have gone to the family with the help I needed. My grandfather, at the age of forty, had built three houses from zero in Braintree, Massachusetts, in stopping time from jobs at the Fore River shipyard, to eleven children’s elevators. But my grandfather left, and I am a gentle writer without experience of the shipyard, so I went to a library instead. More specifically, I went to the library of my hometown, the spinney commemorative library at the start of Massachusetts, claiming that I was going to read instructive volumes on local architecture and the use of land, but knowing, in my heart, I would end up being in stories on the unusual history of the village.

The start was installed as a summer camp for spiritualists, from Boston for Cool Bay Breez and the opportunity to commune with the spectral and the dead. They have set up many interesting structures in the city: gingerbread chalets, parks, gable roofs on dramatic and tried seaside houses. Above all, their work was around the campsite, where they built the “wigwam in the set”. It is made of wood and has eight sides, with an acute roof hanging on a totem. It was built in 1894, but there are still mediums that use the site. After visits to the library, I went for a walk: near the campsite, at the top of the cliffs, on the stone bridge, around the salt marshes. I took notes on the houses I saw and I thought what, exactly, I was looking for here.

Again, I needed to know the houses – Big and Rubing Houses, and how they modify people.

Since I was going to a distinctly Gothic approach from my fictitious house, I had enough fiction to consult, over the periods. I started with Henry James and Bly Manor, in The tour of the screw. Then in Manderley, in Daphne de Maurier Rebecca. I continued to read and reread a haunting story by Joyce Carol Oates, “The Doll”, published for the first time in 1978. This is a woman who is chances on a house with a strange and significant link with her childhood, but I will not say more than that, because I borrowed a version of the disturbing discovery of women for one of my own characters. I also recorded with the recent Beware of womenThe best modern Gothic novel I could think of, and spent a little time trying to understand how it spoke of this house in the upper Michigan peninsula, and how it managed to give the impression that the walls were getting closer to its characters, just like the woods outside seemed to live.

Finally, I went back to a book that is not at all Gothic or fiction, but which is very loved in the region, George Howe Colt The big house: a century in the life of an American summer house. Or rather, I am not completely returned. The big house is a wonderful memory of a family home on Wing’s neck, a small peninsula that moves off the coast of Bourne, Massachusetts, in Buzzards Bay. This is the second time that I have introduced certain elements of Colt’s house in a novel (in a previous book, The stolen coastI used certain aspects as a frame for a robbery), but for any reason, I have never reread the book again. I read it twice, decades ago, after my father offered it to me, and I prefer the details of the house because they dwell in my imagination, maybe wrongly. The portrait is purely impressionist at this stage. It is mixed in memory with another house that I visited like a child not too far from the Wing neck, in Little Harbor: an old house in New England, belonging to an old family from New England, full of dark pieces by pouring one of the others and the elderly of the Havisham type in the process of making the ground and I remember this living room.

I suppose that any author who needs to design a house probably turns to a combination of books and visits and memories. Or maybe there are writers who have really tried the thing with their own hands. I hope they go about work in a fanciful way. I often think of my grandfather’s last house in Sandwich, Massachusetts. He built an extension on the small original structure and filled the house with these small particular notes: an idiot who passed between the floors and was large enough for a child to travel inside; A wooden tingling with personalized chimneys that served in the boards, so that you can throw something in the fire and run in a distant bedroom to smell it burning. It had to be a risk of fire, right? It worked well for him. I hope you don’t mind steal some of these details – or invite in ghosts.

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The house on Buzzards Bay By Dwyer Murphy is available via Viking.