IN DEPTH
Author Interview Kat Ellis
Welsh YA novelist Kat Ellis draws on her love of horror, forged in the 1980s and ‘90s, in her latest novel Harrow Lake, which marks her move to Penguin Random House
Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan E
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do after uni. I knew I liked writing, so I thought I would just do that for three years and figure out my life at the end
ven if you have just a passing familiarit with Kat Ellis’ work, you might guess she is a huge horror fan. The Young Adult novelist’s previous hair-rais- ing, unsetling books have been about a drowned girl who comes back from the dead (with a creepy circus mime thrown in), the son of a serial killer who may be aping his father’s work, and memory purges of young people by a sinister government in a dystopian future. The Welsh author’s love of horror started early in arguably the golden age of horror films, aided by some now-argued-about lax parenting. Ellis says: “I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s and it was a big boom time for horror films. I used to go to my dad’s house and he had this huge collection of VHS horror films. He always denies this now, but he used to let me rifle through them and watch what- ever I wanted. Those big iconic monster/slasher movies— which I probably shouldn’t have been watching at that age—like ‘Friday the 13th’, ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and ‘Hellraiser’, [they] were my weekend fodder. That’s where the early part of my love for the genre came from. Nowadays, I am still a massive consumer of horror, both reading and watching.” And she is a producer of it, too, as her
latest, Harrow Lake, brings a lot of that ’80s/’90s horror nostalgia home. The novel centres on Lola Nox, the 17-year-old daughter of a controlling, borderline abusive superstar horror filmmaker. When her dad is atacked in their New York home by an unknown assailant, Lola is shipped off to live with her dead mother’s mother, who she has never met, and who lives in Harrow Lake, Indiana— the seting and the name of her father’s most iconic film. The residents, including Lola’s grandmother, are all off-kilter, menacing and hugely obsessed with the film that put
their town on the map, turning it into a virtual horror-film set. Soon people start disappearing, and Lola becomes convinced that someone, or something, is stalking her… Harrow Lake is scary, but also hugely fun, and if there is a film equivalent it isn’t “Friday the 13th” but
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