There’s something about an endless, open landscape where you can be properly lost, where the land can eat you, which isn’t that available to us in this day and age, and it has a particular effect on our minds and souls when we encounter it.ĭoes it chafe to be described as a horror writer? I found it so gothic, because it looks like freedom but it’s a trap. I was lucky enough to go to the Mojave, which is a huge part of the book. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt that momentary urge to murder a member of their family – it doesn’t mean you’ll do it, but excising those feelings does a disservice to that relationship.

I think there can be a temptation to sentimentalise or sanitise motherhood in popular culture. I’m not a mother, and for me, an element of the horror came from just imagining how overwhelming the pressure must be to provide a whole upbringing for a tiny living human being. Finding that experiment was this little talismanic moment of, “This is going to work.”ĭog lovers might welcome a trigger warning but its depiction of motherhood is pretty disturbing, too.

Then I discovered that as part of its MK-Ultra project, the CIA had installed electrodes in dogs’ brains, to essentially turn them into remote control dogs. I knew it was going to be about nature and nurture, and I wanted to do something on behaviour modification. The novel is quite Grand Guignol and if you’re going to do that, it really helps to have small hooks of reality to hang it on, otherwise it can just drift into madness. What was the starting point for Sundial ?

Ward spoke via Zoom from her home on Dartmoor, where she ascribed a light switching itself off mid-interview to the quirks of country living – either that or a spectral presence making itself felt. Now she’s back with Sundial, a lyrical, twisty tale of a toxic mother-daughter bond that begins as suburban domestic noir and soon hurtles into weirder, more terrifying territory in the Mojave desert.

It became her breakout book, a bestseller described by Stephen King as a “true nerve-shredder”. T ransatlantic author Catriona Ward, 41, published two well-received gothic horror novels, both historical, before switching things up and setting her third, The Last House on Needless Street, on the edge of a forest in contemporary America.

Sundial book catriona ward