The Pixies: Haunted Houses

It's no coincidence that during Covid, when we were all locked inside, that I was drawn in the winter of 2020 to this theme of haunted houses. It was a shit time, I'm not going to lie. I'm sure we can all agree on that. Unlike the summer in which I wrote Melancholia and its monumental sense of history unfolding, The Pixies took place during a winter in which it seemed we would cannibalize ourselves in our own houses. We had so much electronic content, so many faces to see through our screens, and still we were eating ourselves, self-cannibalizing. That's how it felt like during that horrible winter, a period which has haunted so many of my books since (most notably, Presence) with its evocation of a cold, austere place in which the only warmth is the vivid, cackling evil that's in there with you. Punky, trashy evil. That's what the pixies are. Ironically, I was with my family when I wrote this book but when I wrote The Falls, I was living virtually alone in Oxford.