The Making of Salem to Salem: Chapter One

A university Careers Officer once told me a quote I've used a lot since to get out of a tight spot, that Mark Twain once told a confidant: "Sorry I wrote you a long letter, I did not have time to write you a short one"; which illustrates either the folly of being succinct or the time and care it takes to edit down something. I say this by way of justifying why my opening sequence in the novel -- the first raid on the caves -- was supposed to be over and done with in one chapter but instead lasts six chapters. In all fairness, the important character set-ups, world-building and tone-establishing were all too vital to be contained in one chapter which, in my original planning, would have been about five pages long. I'm proud of indulging myself with the descriptions and the little character details -- I wanted to immerse the reader.

It was vital I took time with this plot beat. In the first place, this opening set-piece would be impossible to understand if it was rushed: why is this community living in fear and why is this girl going to the caves with a crossbow? There were a lot of strange questions, and I wanted to take my time with them, and not overwhelm the reader.

We begin with an ethereal, even dreamlike opening where Abigail's peaceful afternoon out in the front garden is shattered. I actually had a laptop issue where much of this first chapter was wiped away and I had to rewrite it so the descriptions of the pilgrims gardening beneath the sunlight and the near-utopic language I used, "the pleasant afternoon twilight", I wanted to create that sense of disruption right there in the first paragraph. This is something every author -- especially a horror author -- relishes. We have all these pilgrims gardening, getting on with their lives, and then out of nowhere comes this figure -- Martin Hardcastle -- to tell her about the killings. That first sentence had the ring of a crime novel's first sentence, in a way, and it also suggested (that primal, nearly medieval word, "killings") the sense of a feudal society, removed from a legal sense.

Martin Hardcastle was originally called Martin Hardscrabble, and then -- I kid you not -- I recalled where I heard that name: Monsters' University. So, I scrapped Hardscrabble and he became Hardcastle, a name which conveys the sense of something old and firm and it had this hard aura of authority, almost to parody, which is why Hardcastle is not particularly effective as an authority figure. The name "Martin", as well, isn't really an alpha-male name, so that does in any idea of Martin Hardcastle being authoritarian; he is, in a way, but he's really weak and he needs Abigail to solve the problem.

I have genuine fun naming characters and coming up with meaningful names for them. I'm pretty sure all creatives have fun doing this. You can see it in Don't Worry Darling, the recent Olivia Wilde film, where the trapped characters have names like Alice and Jack Chambers. My main character was always going to be called Abigail: that's a name which, to me, conveys an austere Old Testament sense. I don't want to offend anyone with the name -- it's a great name -- but it conveys a sense of toughness, of professionalism, of maturity as well, in the way say that "Ralph" does not. I don't really think of "Abigail" as being a goodtime girl name, like maybe "Abby" would be. It's never Abby; it's Abigail, cold and severe. You can see that in the surname "Mitchell" which could be heard as "meet chill"; she's a cold and steely girl. "Mitch", also sounds like ditch so there's the gardening connection. It maybe even sounds like witch. Abigail Witch-kill. You can have plenty of fun doing this, as illustrated.

Really, Abigail was named after Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell. That becomes apparent with the twist at the end. In a conservative sense, she's like the last line of defence between old-fashioned values and these long-haired types led by William Peddlarson. There's also the Joni Mitchell connection and that added a certain peace and a certain tranquillity to the gardening scenes; there's also the "Woodstock" pun.

The Martin Hardcastle line about "dragging them back to the caves" becomes all the more chilling in light of the twist halfway through the book, where it's clear he probably had a hand in knocking out these kids and not dragging them back to the caves, but dragging them back to the colony. I didn't want to sign-post the twist from the very start but, of course, you have to make a ridiculous twist like that very plausible. That was why I made sure Martin had long and greasy hair, all unwashed; he's a hippie, after all.

The family dynamic is also established in this chapter -- as it should be. We meet Abigail's parents, with whom she has contrasting relationships. Her mother and father are very much like fire and ice: her father I describe as being like a bear who wants to crush people with his hugs; her mother is far more timid and scared and cowers from Abigail. It would make sense that with such a strong and overpowering personality for her father, both Abigail and her mother (and, come to think of it, her sister as well) would be in his shadow. That huge not aggressive but aggressively-friendly personality would definitely have some kind of impact on all of them. Now, Abigail (being young) thinks this is because of her and her witchfinding -- and it kind of is. But also, it's because of her father and what it is implicitly replied is that, while he's huge and friendly, he's a strong personality and he hangs over the Mitchell house.

I spend a lot of time on Abigail's grandfather and his boozing. I wanted there to be some kind of connection between the Old World and the New World as that offsets any anticipation of the twist. Then again, this created a potential plothole -- why are Billy and his cohorts so young? I solved this by having time move differently in the warp hole and having the characters not age when they're in the L.A. realm.

The reference to Hell that ends this chapter is one of the few Biblical references I had in the book. I made the early decision to mainly jettison them, as my last book was very religious and I didn't want this one to be too po-faced. The sound of a door slamming is such a clear and visceral noise, something unfortunately we have all heard, and I knew readers would be able to connect the sound of Abigail's crossbow with that sound. It also has that air of teenage angst to it; that all the killing she does carries the rage of a teenager. I was really angry writing this book, I'll admit, maybe more so than when I was seventeen or eighteen, so that was something powerful and visceral I decided early on.