Melinda Salisbury’s Local Gods is folk horror for all ages

Melinda Salisbury. // image courtesy the author

Author Melinda Salisbury’s newest novel, Local Gods, is billed as YA, but this folk horror tale set in the hills of northern New England is so engrossing and involving, it’s sure to make any fan of supernatural fiction want to immerse themselves in the tale of Sylvie Singer’s experiences in the West Woods outside Pine Ridge Hollow.

“When a bone-white crow lands in Sylvie Singer’s backyard, she knows trouble is coming,” begins the pitch for Local Gods, and from there, Sylvie’s life is ruined when an FBI raid reveals her father’s double life, she’s forced to live in an abandoned railway station in the aforementioned woods, replete with carnivorous white deer, where she then meets Illican, a horned god bound to the woods who is dying.

It’s a lot, and Salisbury’s prose does an amazing job utilizing magical realism so that Pine Ridge Hollow and the West Woods feel like real places. Yes, there is a horned god of the woods. Yes, there are mystical portents. Yes, things go even wilder than you could even expect. However, it all feels like the very real tale of a young woman whose life has been upended in quite realistic ways.

At its heart, Local Gods tells Sylvie’s story in a way relatable to anyone whose adolescence felt as though everyone were out to get them, and that’s how Salisbury says she approached the challenge of crafting a location that feels like it could exist when we spoke with her via Zoom in early June, ahead of the book’s release.

“I think it’s rooting it in what you already know and what you’ve already experienced,” the author says. “So when I was Sylvie’s age, I spent a lot of my time in the woods, as well, so it’s something like being that age and being in a wooded environment is something that’s very familiar to me.”

While Salisbury didn’t end up in the woods entirely for the same reasons as Sylvie, she, too, had quite a tumultuous relationship with her family and ended up in the woods in a similar way.

“They’re a dangerous place, but they’re safer than being in the town, being around those people,” Salisbury continues. “For me, it was not necessarily about safety, but I felt more secure in the woods, so rooting it in that, I think, probably is where it came from.”

One of the more fascinating parts of Local Gods is that everybody in the town acknowledges that there’s something wrong with the West Woods and that they should be avoided, and that there are carnivorous deer that live within, but they don’t interrogate that and neither does Sylvie, but she’s forced to. This aspect of the novel led us to ask Salisbury what the genesis of this story was: which came first, the idea of a young woman meets forest god or a young woman’s father does something terrible?

“It started with a forest god,” answers Salisbury with no hesitation. “Whenever I write, I write based on images that appear in my head. Obviously, they’re based on things I’ve seen. I’m not conjuring them up completely. In the same way as dreams are extrapolations of the stuff in the day, I think ideas come from the same kind of place.”

Salisbury does not subscribe to the concept that ideas are around you all the time, with all you needing to do is pay attention and grab onto them.

“I think they come from people,” she says. “And so for me, this started with a girl coming across a horned figure in the woods, and wondering then who that figure was, what it meant, what had happened, and playing the ‘what if?’ game from there and seeing, ‘Is there a story in here? Can I make a story out of this?’”

Salisbury’s “what if?” game led to questions like, “Why would this god be in the woods? What about these woods specifically is different, and that means they hold a god? Do all woods hold a god?” Local Gods started very much with the idea of Sylvie meeting Illican, and then going off and very deliberately exploring the circumstances around how that came about, then what it meant, and finally ended up with Salisbury asking herself, “How far can I push this?” and “How weird can I get with it?”

Folk horror has been enjoying a renaissance really over the last decade, and Salisbury thinks that, culturally, her country of Britain has a greater connection to the genre of folk horror than perhaps we do here in the States. She acknowledges the looming trifecta of ’70s films Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and The Wicker Man, with the latter being one of the influencing texts for Local Gods.

“It is a quite peculiarly British thing, I think, based very much on the idea that we’re not a fast-moving country in terms of accepting novelty or new ideas or things,” Salisbury points out. “I think where folk horror exists is in modernity brushing up against tradition and the push and pull of that, so I think it is quite peculiarly British because of who we are as a people and how unwilling we are to embrace the modern and the new and to embrace change at all.”

Folk horror’s deep British roots brush up against Salisbury, as she lives in a town called Hastings, which has a folk festival every May called Jack in the Green. This is a three-day festival that does, in fact, culminate in a sacrifice up on the West Hill.

“At the beginning of the festival, the Jack is released,” explains the author. “It’s a leafed figure with a crown and the Green Man face mask. There’s an entire weekend of Morris dancing and Pagan-esque drumming and an awful lot of drinking and singing and general shenanigans that culminates in most of the town trekking up the hill on bank holiday Monday in May, and sacrificing the Jack so we can begin summer.”

At the end of it all, Jack’s coat is stripped down, with everyone in the town given a leaf that secures their future and fortune for the following year, and once you’ve finished Local Gods, one will very much agree that the novel is “rooted in that very much,” Salisbury puts it.

Interestingly enough, Local Gods, despite its connection to the very British genre of folk horror, was never not set in the United States. Despite the fact folk horror is such a British thing, Salisbury offers, its inhabitants are now too interconnected. As their transport infrastructure is too good, Britain’s too small of a country to really be able to sustain anything as “spooky and freaky” as what happens in the novel, she says, noting, “You would need somewhere that is quite vast and is quite isolated.”

Having played with this idea before in another horror novel she wrote called Hold Back the Tide, which is set at Loch Ness, Salisbury realized that she understood how you could imagine there would be a monster there, as the scale, the scope, and the size of it was so huge.

“I was like, ‘Okay, I do understand now why people are so willing to lend credence to the idea there might be a monster in there,’” Salisbury says. “Because it’s such an isolated location. It’s so big and vast, but you don’t get many of those in the UK now.”

That said, she didn’t want to set another novel in Scotland, worried the people of Scotland might think she was making suggestions about their practices by returning there for a second time and setting another horror book there. Therefore, the States felt like the right place, and with the location she chose as northern New England, it was still a place that is quite rooted in British culture.

“It felt like the natural place to do it and also, the location is real,” Salisbury explains. “It would be where Livermore is in New Hampshire, which is in kind of the White Mountain National Park. It was a ghost town.”

Once she found that, Salisbury says, she realized that was the location it needed to be. The decision was also for reasons of allowing what happens in the book to be able to happen in a way that would allow the reader to suspend enough disbelief to go along with it and accept that these events could still be happening.

“It needed to be somewhere so much bigger than the UK,” muses Salisbury. “Somewhere where there are still pockets of society that can slip under the radar more easily.”

One would think that, with all of these details so readily at hand, the author of Local Gods engaged in immersive research before sitting down to write the novel, but that’s not the case. Salisbury never does any research before she writes a first draft, something she notes might be a foolish thing to admit, but she says it’s necessary for her process.

“When I write the first draft, I want it to be my version of events,” she offers.” I want it to be solidly what I want to write. Then I go back in and look and try to fill in the gaps of what I didn’t know.”

It’s Google searches, Salisbury states matter-of-factly. The author searches very hard for the things she wants for her novels to see if they exist: “Because they invariably do in some manifestation and when they don’t, I can figure out the rest.”

Salisbury particularly wanted New England because of its association with witch hunting, as well. The author says another core text that underlines the book is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, with its idea of an entire community coming together to scapegoat something to preserve themselves and return to a status quo.

The plot of Local Gods also ties into much of what’s been explored in the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and other notable New England writers of horror and weird fiction, wherein insular communities see anyone whose family hasn’t been there since a town’s founding as an outsider.

“I really wanted to think about what made these places cohesive and what gave people power within that cohesion,” Salisbury says. “What elevated one person above another? If it wasn’t gonna be money–’cause I’d taken that out the equation very early on in the story–then what else was it gonna be?”

Salisbury thought about the provenance of having people who believed so firmly that the town was theirs–that because they established it, that it was their land, it was theirs for the taking–thinking that gave them some particular right over the literal lives of other people who came to the town or who lived in the town. Manifest destiny definitely finds its way through many aspects of Local Gods.

“Because it feels like a slightly current issue that the UK is kinda having and other countries are having today, too,” acknowledges the author. “This idea of certain people being in a place first giving them more rights and more power, and just what a strange concept that is–especially if you perhaps weren’t even the people who were there first, but you have managed to negotiate around that in a way that kind of has rewritten history for you. I’m trying so hard not to be political, but it’s really tough.”

Melinda Salisbury’s Local Gods is out Tuesday, August 4, from Sarah Barley Books. More details here.