Alex Patrikios of the wonderful literary group #LoveOzYA interviewed me via Zoom the other day, to talk about The Ghost Squad–she had great questions, and I really enjoyed our chat! The interview is now up as a transcript on the #LOveOzYA website, and you can also see clips of the video, exploring such things as research, speculative fiction tropes, and the writing life, at their You Tube channel. Here’s an extract from the interview, about the inspiration and research behind the book:

Was there a particular moment of inspiration that sparked the idea for THE GHOST SQUAD?

A while back, I went to this little museum in Rome, which is called the Museum of Purgatory. Of course in Catholic doctrine, purgatory is a sort of halfway house between heaven and hell. This particular museum was quite a weird little place, and (I learned) this priest in the 19th Century had tried to show proof that purgatory existed and he did with burned handprints on a piece of fabric, supposedly of people who had tried to send messages from purgatory.

But this is now: people don’t believe a burned handprint on a piece of fabric is proof. So I thought, okay, what would cause a disturbance in the electronic systems — monitoring machines and other things like that in hospitals — so I had a look, and found out about electronic magnetic pulses(note: caused by solar storms). I found out about the Carrington Event, and also that a lot of governments actually have contingency plans for when the next one hits. I read stuff from both NASA and the British Government, about what they plan to do in the event of an electromagnetic pulse.

When I saw the Carrington Event had happened around the same time you saw this big interest in seances and spiritualism, in the Victorian times, I thought, okay, this is kind of ‘ghosty’ stuff — and maybe in my lifetime, it would trigger something similar.

Everything sort of fell into place after that.

Apart from that kind of research — NASA, government documents — did you also look at popular movies or shows that have that speculative flavour, and try to examine the genre itself?

Absolutely! Also the novel came out of a creative practice Phd, so that was the creative part of it, but the academic part of it was all about afterlife fiction for young adults. Really fantastic books, like Neal Shusterman’s Everlost trilogy, Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride, and Lynette Lounsbury’s Afterworld.

I watched a lot of films and TV series — things like The Glitch, and the French series The Returned, and even Lost have examples of (afterlife fiction). That was fun! I had so much fun doing ‘research’, reading all these great books and watching all these terrific TV series and films.

I also read a lot of folklore and (material) from religious and spiritual traditions. I had three years to do the Phd, which was fantastic, because it meant I could really develop the book in the very rich and complex way that I wanted to do.

You can read the whole interview here.