The Book Stacks

Author Karen White joins us today to talk about her writing, paranormal fiction and her book The House on Tradd Street.

It’s autumn outside; full dark comes earlier, trees change color and the air becomes crisper. The scent of burning leaves mingles with that of approaching winter. And maybe because this time of year heralds in one of my favorite holidays, Halloween, my interests turn to the spooky, dark and downright scary.

I know I’m not the only one. Check out the selections on cable television this month—there’s so many shows with the words ‘haunting’, ‘ghosts’ and ‘paranormal’ that if you tried to TiVo them all, you’d run out of space (I know this because I tried).

Now, being a product of the South, I was raised with ghost stories. Not only the deliberately scary stuff about boogey men and the devil my dad would tell us after the lights were out, but the everyday stories of conversations my grandmother had with my grandfather (who’d been dead for almost a decade), and how the week before Pearl Harbor that same grandmother had dreamed of a sky filled with planes and raining bombs.

Life is full of the unexplained, and my Southern upbringing might have made me more accepting of this, and has no doubt fueled my own storytelling. It probably also enabled me to be more nonchalant when my then three-year-old son pointed to an empty corner of the living room and wanted to know ‘who that man with the hat is.’ Gives you the creepy-crawlies, doesn’t it?

In my past eight novels, I’ve splashed a bit of paranormal here and there—a little girl with an ‘imaginary friend’, pennies that show up in unexplained and unexpected places, a woman who travels back in time one-hundred-and-fifty years. But I’ve never been so blatant about paranormal activity as I’ve been in my November release, The House on Tradd Street, my self-professed ‘Moonlighting meets The Sixth Sense’ book.

In the book the protagonist, Melanie Middleton, is an uptight Charleston realtor who specializes in historic real estate. She also sees dead people, although she’s in denial about it. I figured I couldn’t write a book about the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina and its old houses without throwing in a ghost or two. It would be like writing a book about England without British accents and umbrellas.

Melanie inherits a crumbling house on Tradd Street from a client—along with a housekeeper, a dog, and a host of ghosts anxious to tell her something. Jack Trenholm—a journalist obsessed with solving historical mysteries—is working on a story about Confederate diamonds that were supposedly hidden in Melanie’s house during the Civil War. But someone—either living or dead—doesn’t Melanie and Jack to discover the truth.

I had more fun writing this book than I should have been allowed. Even better than writing about the ghosts was the inherited dog in the book, General Lee, who is the twin of my own black and white Havanese, Quincy. Even has the same expressions and mannerisms. I did have to stop, however, when he insisted I use him for the cover of the book and I think the picture on the front (based on an actual house on Tradd Street) worked much better.

People always ask me if I use my real life in my books. The answer is yes and no. It’s inevitable, I think, to write what we know (hence the dog)—and I know myself and my life. But my real life is so boring compared to the lives my fictional characters. So instead I try to use the essence of my life—emotions based on real events—to share with readers. We’ve all known heartache, loss, great joy—not all over the same things, but we still remember how we felt. That’s the part of me that I share in my books.

For The House on Tradd Street, I borrowed on my admiration of Charleston, my fascination with old houses, and my memories of brushes with the paranormal to create a work of fiction I hope makes readers laugh and cry, and maybe—hopefully—even give them the creepy-crawlies.