The Night Stairs is about mysterious outbreak of vertigo in a girls’ boarding school. Is it a virus? A possession? And how does it connect to the tragic deaths of two young women, centuries apart?
Where did I get the idea from? If only I had a pound for every time I’ve been asked that question! I could buy even MORE books.
At any given time, I have a few ‘bubbles’ floating around in my head, things I’ve seen or that I’m interested in that I think might make a good book one day. It might be a location, or a news story, or a twist I’d like to write. On their own, these bubbles don’t do much. It’s when they bump into each other and pop that things get interesting.
The bubbles that eventually became The Night Stairs were as follows:
Years ago, in Oswestry in Shropshire, I read the words THE LAST DAY, in white paint on the red brick wall of the local school. I learned that the head boy and girl repaint them every year on the last day of term in tribute to a pupil who died a century before. How beautiful, I thought, how sad. I’m having that.
Even more years ago, I’d been struck with Ménière’s disease – an incurable inner-ear condition that causes unpredictable, terrifying bouts of vertigo that make stationary rooms tilt like ship-decks and leave me clinging to floors as though to cliff faces. One of the many doctors I saw suggested that the vertigo might be psychosomatic. This spiked an interest in a connection between mental stress and physical symptoms.
More years ago still, I’d read Stephen King’s masterpiece Carrie, abut the terrifying febrile power of the teenage girl who has been wronged. I was having a crappy time at school and the only friends I could rely on were characters in books.
Before THAT I’d read Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers boarding-school books and became obsessed with those strange institutions that take teenagers and lock them up in the middle of nowhere.
As many years ago as I have been alive, a priest baptised me over a font in a Catholic church, giving me a complicated relationship with the Church of Rome (I’m not sure any other kind is possible) that has quietly influenced my personality, my weird love of authority and my taste in music, men, books, even interior design.
Those bubbles bumped into each other and popped and their contents merged into the book you’re about to read. The Night Stairs is about being a teenage girl, it’s about superstition, tradition and ritual, it’s about the power of storytelling, it’s about shame and the terrible things bodies will do when the mouth can’t express what’s happening inside. I drew on my own childhood and every book I have ever loved.
