March 2025

"Starting a Gothic novel with a churchyard — isn't that a bit clichéd?" I've been asked the question several times. I suppose it's an almost inevitable step for the genre.

But as I was a novice, it was anything but obvious to me. It simply seemed logical, almost academic to me. As a computer science teacher, I've always had the reflex of showing the final result before explaining the path to get there. When teaching impatient students, you begin by unveiling the program that works. Only afterwards do you take it apart and demonstrate each step of how it was built.

CastleHill was born this way. Start at the end. Start with the place where everything comes to a close. But there was something else too. Certain cemeteries possess an artistic beauty that fascinates me. A grave, classical heaviness. Some almost resemble open-air works of art. Père-Lachaise Cemetery has something theatrical about it. The Madeleine Cemetery, where Jules Verne rests, is luminous. As for Highgate, in London, you'd think you'd fallen into a Tim Burton film. None of these places are merely territories of death. They are filled with memories, silence, and sometimes even humour. There, one encounters the memory of the living more than the absence of the dead.

Very quickly, CastleHill stopped being a funerary backdrop. The churchyard became a place of life. It's probably at that moment that the novel truly found its personality.

I began having fun with traditional Gothic myths. I found it amusing to imagine a crowd of bon-vivant dead: chatty ghosts, touchy creatures who grumble, presences sometimes ridiculous, sometimes touching. I even wrote a song about it! Instead of a kingdom frozen in the macabre, CastleHill became a lively neighbourhood, with its habits, its little squabbles, and its eccentric inhabitants.

Oddly enough, I believe it's also at this precise moment that the romance between Gabriel and Penelope began to breathe. The day of Penelope's funeral.

The churchyard represented the best possible starting point, because it already contained all the contradictions of the novel: death and humour, elegance and decrepitude, romance and action. The list is long. In wanting to start at the end, I found myself creating a still life that was anything but still — and brimming, instead, with life.