A Heartfelt (actually feeling your heart with a clawed, corpse hand) Ode to My Favorite Spooky Novel: Darcy Coates’ Gallows Hill

Author’s note: Proceed without fear, this is a recommendation for you to read the book, not a review that would spoil it. 

No tricks, just treats.

Spooky runs through my veins (literally – ask any haunted house designer or movie-magic maven, blood is super spooky). For many, a list of their favorite things would include raindrops on roses or maybe whiskers on kittens. But for me? It’s darkened halls and a shadow moving where it shouldn't…a jerky motion only caught out of the corner of your eye…or a new acquaintance with a strange penchant for only coming out at night. You’ll find me in the spooky places, no bones about it. 

On this spookiest of months, as the temperature stealthily claws itself lower and lower across the floorboards and orange bursts of dying leaves scramble across your path in the wind: I offer you this tasty treat. 

I bring to you my favorite spooky novel and why I love it so…why its nails trailing ever so softly down my spine (barely even touching the skin…do I even really feel them there at all? Is it maybe…just the wind?) make my heart go pitter-patter and swell in anticipation. What is this spookiest of tales? It’s Gallows Hill, by Darcy Coates.

Darcy Coates is an expert in the craft of writing modern horror and spooky fiction. She plays with the form and its capabilities as naturally as you or I would try on different costumes before going to a Halloween party. She throws a ghostly sheet of existential dread over you in Voices in the Snow, drops lighthearted hauntings and quirky townsfolk into your pumpkin-shaped candy bucket in the Gravekeeper series, and then sinks her shovel deep into the ground, sprinkling you with grave dirt, as she digs up the concept of generational trauma and how it can manifest itself in Gallows Hill.

There are several reasons I adore Gallows Hill. 

1. It’s an intensely character-driven story. Our heroine, Margot Hull, wanders into our lives, staggering into what is apparently her family home and business (a spooky vineyard), in a confused daze. She knows nothing about her past, her parents’ past, or her ancestors’ past, and she discovers more about all of those things at the same time that the audience does. The reader and Margot are racing neck and neck towards a strange finish line, tied in a grim race to learn who she is and where she comes from.

2. At its core, Gallows Hill is – deeply and intrinsically – a spooky mystery. At first, it's as if we only see the events happening around Margot in the dim candlelight glow of a darkened hallway. We’re reaching our arms out into the gloom, trying to figure out our surroundings. As the story quickens, the candlelight illuminates a little farther…just a little more…until suddenly we find ourselves outside in the silvery moonlight, racing away from (or is it towards?) something that’s been chasing us for as long as we can remember…perhaps even longer than that.

To delightful effect, the lines between the mystery elements of the story and the character-driven elements are so blurred that they are indistinguishable - any perceived difference being just a faint specter in the fog.

Part of the mystery of Margot is that she’s lived her life feeling completely rootless - alienated even from herself - and this has led to her having no real connections to anyone in her life. Yet as she stumbles through the haunted house of her past, the very roots beneath the ground she walks on are hers (...if she likes it or not), and slowly, tentatively, connections begin to branch out and grow between Margot and those few mysterious people around her. However, these roots don’t only hold sway over Margot - they also seem to have some kind of power over the few grizzled souls who very obviously know more about what’s going on than she does. 

One of the things I enjoy so much about Gallows Hill is the tentative connections that slowly start to grow and strengthen between Margot and the mysterious folk that suddenly make up her world. Like anything, these relationships take time to build - and they can also be broken. In Gallows Hill, we are given an expertly crafted treat as we watch these fragile connections start to sprout - almost as if they were seedlings left scattered in a hostile garden.

3. Gallows Hill also hits the ultimate sweet spot for me: the spooky setting is most definitely a character, which becomes more and more literal as the story drags you deeper into its dark, earthen, heart. From the imagery of black, empty, branches against a gray sky, lonely stretches of countryside, perilous dirt roads, and unforgiving botany, to the cold robbing the breath from Margot’s lungs and the sudden bursts of birds from suspiciously quiet forests: the very air moving through Margot’s world feels haunted. As the temperature drops, the setting becomes more desolate. The house, the grounds, the vineyard: they all seem to sync their long, loping, eerie, stride in perfect time with the mystery unraveling itself around Margot. The bumps in the night become louder, the sudden clanging of strange old bells in moonlit rooms carry more weight, and the absolutely palpable atmospheric writing clamors to a whole new level - one thick enough to chop down with an axe.

4. There is an overarching, yet understated, theme of social justice as it relates to the concept of generational trauma. In generational trauma, there is the original perpetrator and there are those they harm. Generations later, that harm remains embedded in those affected. On the perpetrating side (such as the governmental genocide of Indigenous peoples and the occupation of their traditional homelands) we’ve seen some acknowledgment of traumas inflicted, little acceptance of the responsibility for the prolonged effects, some apologizing to the minimal extent, and almost no proactive action to heal the harm done.

We can see some of these global, real-world, concepts brought into the fictional realm of Gallows Hill. In generational trauma, there is an initial moment of severance inflicted, somehow disconnecting someone from their own life. They are suspended in time and space, forever torn back to this moment, to this ripple echoing out across their lake. When we first meet Margot, she lives inside of that disconnect. She exists in that strange suspended animation that separates her from her own life. But as the mystery of Margot unwinds itself around her, she shifts. It’s as if she’s been floating outside of the world and is suddenly struck by lightning: she’s jolted back into a life she’s never actively participated in before. As she becomes more and more responsible for what her life will look like, she also somehow loses more control over it until suddenly…we’re not so sure about what side of the generational trauma she’s on.