WHO PUT ELLEN IN THE BLACKGUM TREE ?
An interview with Cherie Priest
D
ecades after trespassing children spotted the desiccated corpse wedged in the treetop , no one knows the answer .
Kate Thrush and her former college professor , Dr . Judith Kane , travel to Cinderwich , Tennessee in hopes that maybe it was their Ellen : Katie ’ s lost aunt , Judith ’ s long-gone lover . But they ’ re not the only ones to have come here looking for closure . The people of Cinderwich , a town hardly more than a skeleton itself , are staunchly resistant to the outsiders ’ questions about Ellen and her killer . And the deeper the two women dig , the more rot they unearth … the closer they come to exhuming the evil that lies , hungering , at the roots of Cinderwich .
Cherie Priest is the best-selling author of two dozen books and novellas , most recently the Booking Agents mysteries Grave Reservations and Flight Risk . However , she is perhaps best known for the steampunk pulp adventures of the Clockwork Century , beginning with Boneshaker . Read on as Cherie reflects on their inspirations to creating CINDERWICH .
DIAMOND : For those who aren ’ t familiar , can you tell us what readers can expect from this book ? CHERIE PRIEST : In short , Cinderwich is a cozy mystery wrapped in a gothic novel . The town of Cinderwich used to be on a rail line , but when the trains stopped running the little burg stopped growing ; now it ’ s a long-lost backwater that ’ s barely on the map . It ’ s a weird , spooky little place , filled with abandoned buildings and the ghosts who once called them home - and it might well be the last known location of a young graduate student who vanished back in the 1970s .
This lost woman ’ s lover and mentor - now elderly and somewhat frail - has summoned the grad student ’ s niece to assist her on a road trip ; and together these two peculiar partners will dig through the derelict blocks of the dying town . At first they find more questions than answers . Who are the charming sisters who live on the hill , and what secrets do they withhold when they welcome visitors ? What of the sweetly grinning ghost who haunts the hotel ? And will Cinderwich ever have an answer to the perennial query , spray-painted on walls for decades , always in the same handwriting : “ Who put Ellen in the Blackgum Tree ?”
How did this project come about ? In all honesty , I was terribly burned out in the wake of a disastrous work-for-hire project that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown ( quite literally ). I was on the very verge of abandoning writing in favor of dusting off my MA to take another stab at teaching ... when a friend asked what I would write if it were all up to me .
If money didn ’ t matter , and even if
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it was never published , what story would I tell ? What would I write if it were just to please myself ?
The answer turned out to be “ fanfiction about me and my friends solving spooky mysteries in a groovy , overgrown , out-of-the-way old town .” I wrote this purely for pleasure , to my own taste , and for my own giggles . When I was finished , the folks who inspired various characters all read the end result and gave the thumbs up - and a couple of them suggested that I ought to try to publish it anyway , even if I simply self-produced it .
Then one day we were discussing it online , and Jason Sizemore at Apex Books saw us chatting . I ’ ve known Jason for decades , and we got talking ... and the rest was history ! I ’ m absolutely delighted that this project has found a happy home , and will hit the market after all .
What kind of obstacles did you face while putting this title together ? CINDERWICH is inspired by a true Jane Doe case that occurred just after WWII in England , and porting that over to the rural south was a little bit of an adventure - but it worked out better than I expected . The actual case featured a woman whose body was found in a Witch ( Wych ) Elm tree , which we don ’ t have here in the United States , so ... I sat down online with a list of regional trees and tried to find something that had the same rhythm to it . “ Blackgum ” worked well , and hey , any flora or fauna with “ black ” in the name suggests spookiness , right ?
But all in all , this project came together very smoothly . If anything , the hardest part was giving a draft to my friends . I wanted them to love the characters they ’ d inspired as much as I did , and I remain eternally grateful for their help and support on this one .
In terms of audience , who is this book for ? This one is for my cozy homies - the mystery folks , and the horror folks , too . It ’ s both gentle and twisty , with a heart of paranormal danger and assistance alike . It ’ s also about the relationship between two women , and how relationships echo down through the decades along with history itself . Not so much repeating , as rhyming . I hope that readers find it both sensitive and scary , but also comforting and fun .
What are you hoping readers take away from this book ? That anyone who says “ There ’ s no such thing as cozy horror ” is full of baloney .
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