Jen Williams is a writer from London currently living in Bristol with her partner and a dramatically fluffy cat. A fan of grisly fairy tales since her youth, Jen has gone on to write dark, unsettling horror thrillers with strong female leads and character-driven fantasy novels with plenty of adventure and magic. The Winnowing Flame trilogy twice won the British Fantasy Award for best novel, and she is partially responsible for the creation of Super Relaxed Fantasy Club. When she’s not writing books, she enjoys messing about with video games and embroidery. She also works as a freelance copywriter and illustrator.

Welcome back to the Hive Jen! Thank you for joining us today to discuss your latest novel, The Hungry Dark

Thank you for having me!

To start with, you have a very evocative prologue – and prologues have been doing the rounds again recently. I’m pretty sure all your books have them? What do you love about a prologue?

I know it’s often a controversial subject with readers and writers alike, but when they are done well, I think they can be excellent. For me, it’s an opportunity to set up, tease or foreshadow things that will impact the main story in a big way – which is often why it’s a bit alarming to hear that people sometimes skip them… There’s important stuff in that prologue, guys! I do think they are especially useful in books like The Hungry Dark, where you can have something absolutely terrifying happen and then cut away in Chapter 1 to something else entirely. It keeps the reader on their toes.

We open with twelve year old Robbie, and of course your last crime thriller, Games for Dead Girls, featured the perspective of children also. What is it about a child’s perspective that suits horror so well? 

Children seem to feature in my work quite often, it’s true, and often terrible things are happening to them… I think with regards to horror in particular, they make great characters firstly because they are vulnerable and it’s our natural inclination to want to protect them, and consequently the stakes feel higher.

Secondly, children just feel a lot closer to that nightmare world of monsters and ghosts. We all remember what it was like to have that very visceral fear of the dark, or the terrible thing that might be hiding in your wardrobe or under your bed. We identify with children because we’ve all been one.

I loved the folk story of the curse of the fell. Folk horror has crept quite closely to your work recently so there’s an obvious personal interest there. Was there a particular story or myth you’d come across that inspired your curse, or is it an amalgamation of many such stories?

There was no single root to it, as far as I can recall, but I have always had an interest and passion for the idea of ‘bad places’. I blame this pretty squarely on Stephen King. I was the classic kid getting Stephen King books out of the library when I was far too young, and the idea that the Overlook Hotel from The Shining was itself evil was such a delicious concept to me that I think it stuck forever. And there was also Castle Rock, the doomed little town in New England where so many of King’s books are set… Or Derry, where Pennywise the Clown spent his time eating children. With horror, and especially ghost stories and folk horror, the past is often intruding on the present in some way – someone in the distant past did a terrible thing, and now we’re all paying for it. The Hungry Dark is that idea taken to the extreme.

Your protagonist, Ashley, is a medium and freely calls herself a crook; but she can see some things. Do you believe in ghosts Jen? Have you ever had any spiritual encounters?

This is such a great question. If you’d asked me when I was eight or nine, I would almost certainly have said yes, and I definitely went through a period of being obsessed with hauntings and poltergeists and the like. These days I am cheerfully cynical about these things, although I am partial to the idea that some events leave a psychological imprint on the landscape around them, and I’ve experienced the odd thing that has made me wonder. A year or so after my dad died I was pottering around my room – a room my dad had never been in – when I was suddenly enveloped in the scent of the tobacco he used to smoke…

I went through that phase too! I had the Most Haunted boxsets.

You really bring your setting of the Lake District to life, what made you choose the lakes?

I went to the Lakes for the first time a few years ago and fell in love with the place immediately. When you’ve lived in London for much of your life and you’re suddenly presented with these huge, craggy fells with jackdaws everywhere it’s like being transported directly to another time and place. Once or twice on walks I almost got lost (a very city person thing to do) and it seemed to me, as I clung to the side of a steep hill in the rain, it was such a remote and potentially dangerous place that I really had to set a scary book there. 

If it helps, I have the opposite problem; I frequently get lost if I find myself in a city.

I wasn’t expecting the socialist undercurrents but thoroughly appreciated them! Was this a path you intended to go down for this story, or is it a theme that grew organically as the story progressed?

I think it’s always a subject that’s close to my heart, and something about Ashley’s character and context really brought it out. She’s a working class kid who grows up in a council flat, whose family are often strapped for cash, and she’s offered this less than moral way of making money… It was interesting to write about the sort of choices you can be faced with when your socioeconomic background has already removed some of them for you.

Ashley finds herself working with an American true crime podcaster, Freddie Miller. You’ve spoken in the past about how your own love for true crime podcasts led you to start writing crime thrillers. Are there any particular true crimes/serial killers you find yourself intrigued by?

Oh way too many! I have a particular interest in missing persons cases, particularly those of children, which as you can imagine are always very sad and difficult to read about. A number of children go missing in The Hungry Dark, and I tried to give the reader a sense of the impact that has on their families – this was also a theme in Games for Dead Girls. And like a lot of people, I find serial killers fascinating; not because they are cool or edgy (actually the vast majority are dreadfully dull creeps with the personality of a brick) but because I want to know what made them like that. A small selection of cases that I tend to go back to again and again are: John List, not a serial killer but a family annihilator who killed his wife, mother and three children before disappearing for eighteen years and starting another family; Israel Keyes, who supposedly left ‘murder kits’ buried all over the United States so he could murder at will; and Ted Bundy, who escaped from prison twice and tried to blame his murders on pornography. What a chump. 

And as a follow up question to that, any particular true crime podcasts you’d recommend?

The Bear Brook podcast is great, genuinely gripping stuff even when it’s talking about the genealogy and genetic techniques they used to solve the mystery. Sweet Bobby isn’t a murder podcast but it does contain some absolutely killer twists (and a reminder that humans are capable of some really outrageous things). My favourite podcast though is The Last Podcast on the Left, which covers a lot of true crime as well as weirder stuff like cryptids and magic and the supernatural. It’s fair to say it’s not… the most serious of podcasts, and definitely not for people who don’t like a lot of laughs with their grisly content, but it is hugely informative, passionately put together and extremely funny. One of my clearest memories of lockdown is wandering my local park every day, listening to the LPOTL guys tell me what a weirdo Aleister Crowley was. Good times. 

Finally, are you able to share any news on what you’re currently working on? What’s next for Jen Williams?

I’m currently writing Titanchild, the sequel to Talonsister, my seventh fantasy novel which came out last year. I’m also working on two new fantasy flavoured projects, one of which I hope to be able to share news of very soon. 

The Hungry Dark is out today! You can order your copy HERE