Interview with Darrin Doyle, author of Let Gravity Seize the Dead

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Darrin Doyle, author of Let Gravity Seize the Dead.

Is Let Gravity Seize the Dead a ghost story, and what does that mean to you?          

It’s a ghost story in the sense that the 2007 family is haunted by their past ancestors and the traumas that they suffered one hundred years earlier. “Ghosts” to me don’t necessarily have to be the literal incarnation of a person who needs to “move on” or anything like that. I think it’s more complicated. A ghost can be any echo of past trauma, a residual aftershock that trembles in the present and shows that we’re all connected, all part of a larger system. When there are tragic deaths, maybe there can be a ripple, of sorts, that continues to disrupt the present in various ways. Whether or not there are literal ghosts in my novella is up to the reader to decide.

To what extent is the theme of Let Gravity Seize the Dead rooted in your experience of Michigan?

This story is entirely rooted in Michigan. I grew up playing in the woods whenever I had the opportunity (there always seemed to be wooded areas near where I lived) and this novella is a sort of love letter to Michigan nature. For this particular book, I spent a lot of time at Ludington State Park (which has many beautiful hiking trails) and Wilderness State Park, where I often stay in a rustic cabin, isolated from people, to do some writing. I used these places as “research” not only to help with descriptions but to simply absorb them into my soul and let them affect the style and tone of the entire novella.

What can you tell us about the Randall family and the old house they move into in 2007?       

The Randall family consists of Beck and Mallory and their two daughters, Lucy and Tina. Beck is an electrical engineer, but he gives up his career to move his family to this very isolated cabin that his grandparents built in the early 1900s. His motivations for doing this are mysterious even to himself, but he buys the cabin and property from his father, who warns Beck that terrible things happened there. The cabin is located at the end of a winding, two-mile, single-lane dirt road, a few miles from the small (and fictional) town of Wolfolk, Michigan. The perfect place for a haunting!

The house has a history that connects with the family’s past. How do teenage daughters Tina and Lucy discover it? 

I see Tina as an intuitive and sensitive person with a mischievous streak. At age 12 (nearly 13), she’s got a wild imagination and playful spirit, and she begins to feel the presence of their ancestors. She starts writing letters to her great-great grandmother, for instance, and becomes obsessed with figuring out what happened to them. She discovers the truth not through research or through any literal communications with the dead, but through the natural world itself, which in the novella is a kind of container for the past. I see nature as a cyclical force, both predictable and unpredictable, which can literally hold onto the secrets and spirits of those who lived there before.

How do the history of family and landscape come together?

There is a mysterious seven-note whistle that sometimes echoes through the forest. It seems that only the children can hear it, and the children in both timelines believe that the whistle portends death. There’s also a black rabbit that appears in both timelines, and this rabbit may or may not be “The Whistler” because we never actually see it whistle, but it seems to be a kind of connecting spirit that links the past and the present. The black rabbit is neither good nor evil, but like nature itself is a neutral force that's there to remind the characters of their link to the past and to the natural world. One of the 1907 characters insists that the black rabbit has human teeth, and though we never actually see this, it suggests that the rabbit is a figure that represents a hybrid of civilization and nature, domesticity and wildness.

On your website, it says you know “what skeletons do.” Can you elaborate on that?

I’m glad you asked that! I love the phrase because it’s mysterious, but the truth is that it comes from an inside-joke with my family. My son Charlie was 3 years old, and he (like most kids that age) said some pretty wild things. One day, he said to his older brother (who was 5 at the time), “You know everything.” My 5-year-old said, “I don’t know everything. I don’t, like, know what Japanese things say.” And my 3-year-old paused for a second before saying, “But you know what skeletons do.” We thought it was so weird and funny, and we never asked him what he meant (we didn’t want to know).

You have worked in many diverse jobs and are now a professor teaching at Central Michigan University. Tell us about that trajectory.

I’ve had many, many jobs, yes, from paperboy to janitor, pizza delivery driver to telemarketer, mover to copy consultant. I held odd jobs from age 9 until age 25, when I decided to finish my undergraduate degree in English, at which time I took a couple of creative writing classes. I’d always liked to write on my own, but I never really considered it a serious pursuit. Two of my professors at Western Michigan University encouraged me to apply to the MFA program there. I’d never even heard of MFA programs, but suddenly it opened up the possibility of pursuing an art with the career goal in mind. After that, I took a few years off from school, taught English in Japan, worked as a technical writer and freelance writer, and then decided that I missed the community of graduate school and went to get my PhD from the University of Cincinnati. After graduating, it took four more years and about 400 job applications but I finally landed a tenure-track job at Central Michigan University, where I teach creative writing.

How did you become a writer and what can you tell us about your other works?

As I alluded to in my previous answer, the bottom line is that I eventually devoted myself to it (at the ripe old age of 25). I stopped dabbling in it and became disciplined and started writing every day. I did this for years before I saw any notable success or publications. But eventually I went from a person with zero books published to now having my seventh book published.

As for my other works, I’ve published three short story collections and three novels (all available at any bookseller). My stories tend to include comedy and darkness, realism and magical realism, satire and strangeness. I’m an impatient person who enjoys many modes of writing, so I try to never write the same thing twice. My most successful book as far as sales is my recent comedy/horror werewolf novel, The Beast in Aisle 34.

The cover art for Let Gravity Seize the Dead is very striking. Who is the artist and can you give us a clue as to its significance?

Yes, I love this cover! It was designed by C.B. Royal, who is the daughter of Jaynie Royal, the founder of Regal House Publishing. The image is perfect: it’s a skeleton of a rabbit entwined with leaves and branches. The tones are earthy brown, grey, black. I already mentioned the black rabbit “whistler” figure from the novella, and the entwining of branches and leaves and vines with the skeleton nicely illustrates the idea that nature is both in constant flux and yet never changing, never forgetting.

Why are ghost stories and horror of such enduring importance? Where does it all begin?

Ghost stories and horror are a way for us to grapple with the central question of life, which is what happens after we die. Maybe ghosts are a reminder of our mortality while also being a kind of reassurance that things don't simply end after we die. In another sense, as I spoke about earlier, ghosts represent the past returning into the present, so they’re probably a way for us to deal with any kind of loss, regret, and trauma. On another very basic level, it's just fun to be scared (at least for some people, haha). There are all kinds of studies about the endorphin rush and the heightened senses that occur when we enter a mode of terror, followed by the pleasant release once we realize that the threat is over.

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About Darrin Doyle:

Darrin Doyle is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the novella, Let Gravity Seize the Dead (Regal House Publishing) and the novel The Beast in Aisle 34 (Tortoise Books). His short stories have appeared in many literary journals. He teaches at Central Michigan University. His website is www.darrindoyle.com

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