Carole Johnstone is the author of the novels The Blackhouse and Mirrorland. We asked her to talk about Scotland as a literary setting. Here she delves into all of the circumstantial atmosphere and eeriness such a place evokes in both its landscape and its communities.
The Blackhouse
by Carole Johnstone
The Highlands and islands of Scotland are great backdrops for gothic psychological thrillers like The Blackhouse because of their wildness and isolation, the idea that you’re so easily – and suddenly – cut off from the rest of the world. And the Outer Hebrides, an island chain in the Atlantic Ocean, forty miles west of Scotland, is one of the more extreme examples of that.
I was lucky enough to be able to live on the northernmost island, the Isle of Lewis & Harris, for several months in 2018, and realized firsthand just how different life there can be. The weather is very unpredictable: The islands are battered by Atlantic storms, particularly in the autumn and winter. Power cuts are frequent, and it’s very common to have no mobile signal or internet access. Living on a headland, our only near neighbors were sheep, and at night, the darkness was absolute. The sense of isolation and vulnerability was very real – as was the need to very quickly become self-reliant. Islands are therefore places with inevitably isolated communities and relationships, fostering extraordinary closeness but also dysfunction: fear, betrayal, and huge secrets, kept perhaps for generations, until outsiders might threaten to expose them.
The Highlands and Islands can also feel very otherworldly, rich with superstition and ritual, derived from Celtic and Norse mythology, and a bloody history of clan warfare and invasion. The islands of the Outer Hebrides are long believed by many to be “thin places,” where the walls between our world and all other worlds are at their thinnest. There is genuinely such a palpable sense of the eerie and uncanny on the islands; it’s an almost intrinsic part of their character. There is also such a strong and visible connection between the past and the present: there are stone circles and monoliths standing in fields and virtually intact Iron Age brochs sitting alongside modern holiday homes. This, too, is such an important part of what gothic fiction is: the idea of the past affecting or infecting the present.
An important part of The Blackhouse plot concerns an archaeological dig, and this is based upon a real dig on South Uist in the early 2000s, where two Bronze Age bodies were discovered inside a burial mound. They were mummified, as many bodies on the islands often are due to large areas of peat bog. When these bodies were excavated, it was discovered that they were in fact composite bodies, made up of many people who had died centuries apart, and that these bodies had, at one point, been dug up and put on display above ground for many years before being reburied. There are so many strange and inexplicable stories like these on the islands.
For me, the Scottish island setting of The Blackhouse was hugely important for all these reasons and more. Not least that I conceived the entire plot while living there! For me, good reading is pure escapism. If I’ve achieved anything with this book, I hope it is that, by the end, readers will feel like they have been to this special, unforgettable place; that they know it and miss it and can’t wait to one day return.