I thought I might do a post on each of the stories in The Bitterwood Bible, for anyone who’s interested in the story backgrounds.
Today, it’s “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter”, my British Fantasy Award-winning tale, which originally appeared in the beautiful Fearie Tales anthology edited by Steve Jones and published by Jo Fletcher Books.
“The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter”
When Steve emailed me asking for a submission for this anthology that needed to be ‘more horror than fantasy’, I was casting about for ideas with a bit of personal terror. I don’t really think of myself as a horror writer. My first effort was deemed ‘Good, but I think you can do better’. After some fist shaking and howling (on my part), I went back to work. I was listening to Florence and the Machine’s Lungs for the first time … when “My Boy Builds Coffins” came on, I started to think about a society that regarded coffin-making not simply as a necessary service, but also as an art form. On top of that, it was an eldritch art form required to keep the dead beneath the earth. I wanted a story that had layers of unspoken secrets – and also different sorts of ghosts.
When I heard “Girl with One Eye”, I got a picture of Hepsibah in my mind’s eye: this thin girl standing in front of this heavy door, with a short gamine haircut that had started to grow out and curl a bit because she wasn’t overly given to worrying about her appearance. She was wearing a brown woollen dress, a bit Jane Eyre-like, with long sleeves, buttons up the front and long skirts, and she had on a kind of baker boy’s cap. At her shoulder was the ghost of her father, and Hector is a nasty piece of work. I could hear his voice and knew how adversarial their relationship was, but that no matter how much Hepsibah hated her father, she shared some characteristics with him and that’s why he was still hanging around. The society was a kind of Victorian setting but mixed with some elements similar to the world of Sourdough and Other Stories.
Hepsibah is one of my favourite characters – she’s a terrible mess of a human, but really fascinating. I wanted to give a reader one picture of her and then twist that around at the end, show that she wasn’t as well-adjusted as she at first appeared. That she and her dreadful father had more in common than anyone might think. And she was very important because as soon as I’d written this story, I knew I had the start of a new collection – The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings – because she wasn’t the sort of character who would just quietly go away.