Former secondary school English teacher and award-winning author, Lucy Strange, introduces her new standalone ghost story The Boy at the Window. This chilling tale offers the perfect introduction to the Gothic genre for pupils in KS3. Read on to hear the inspiration behind the story and don't miss the handy hints and tips on how to use the text in the classroom.
I love murder mysteries, I love romance and historical fiction, I love science fiction and fantasy and humour, but I must confess – the Gothic has to be my favourite literary genre. In my fifteen years as a secondary school English teacher, one of the absolute highlights of my teaching year was studying Gothic Literature with KS3 students. It was the one term I could guarantee maximum engagement from a class. They adored the dark, mysterious atmosphere of gothic stories, the thrill of fear and psychological tension and – probably most of all – the dramatic twists.
Playing with gothic conventions such as remote settings, nightmares, doppelgängers and the supernatural always resulted in some fabulous creative writing from the students themselves. I found they wrote their best descriptions when they were working to create that sinister atmosphere. The challenge of making the reader feel UNSETTLED was an inspiring one, especially when students had to prevent themselves from crossing the line into Horror – keeping the writing subtle, and building a dark, brooding mood without relying on anything too gory or graphic!
And from an analytical perspective, it was always immensely rewarding too. Students very often felt more sincerely affected by these spine-chilling stories than they did by other literature we explored together, so it was a huge confidence boost to them to be able to pick out the details in the text that had made them feel tense or intrigued. There was a real sense of appreciation for the craft of writing as they worked out exactly how the author had created the feeling of foreboding, as they examined the negative connotations of particular language choices, as they considered what pathetic fallacy added to their experience of the story, or how the writer had controlled the pace and tension.
But the experience of teaching gothic texts was not without its frustrations. Many of the stories we read together were written in the 19th Century and, as brilliant as they are, some students struggled with the longer, more complex sentence structures and the archaic vocabulary – particularly when they were required to read sections independently. Students with a lower reading age, dyslexic students, or those who spoke English as an additional language often found these older texts intimidating and sometimes inaccessible.
There was also – increasingly I felt – a time pressure on our studies that meant we could rarely read a whole gothic novel together. More often we relied on extracts, which always felt unsatisfactory: without the narrative context and momentum of the surrounding story, so many of those iconic moments in gothic literature lost their spooky oomph. I’m a big believer in the power of reading aloud – sharing stories as a class, and experiencing those swooping emotions, those sudden shivers and realisations communally rather than individually. For me it was one of the best things about teaching – pure magic – when they SHUSHED each other because they wanted me to read the next bit; or those sharp intakes of breath and the BOUNCING in seats when they worked something out but knew they mustn’t spoil it for others; or the collective GASP as we reached an unexpected twist. Yet, despite my passion and enthusiasm, it seemed that reading entire stories aloud as a class was a luxury we could rarely afford.
I have been writing books for young readers for over ten years now. Many of my stories have a gothic whiff about them (the dusty aroma of a forgotten attic room perhaps, or the bouquet of a freshly dug graveyard beneath a full moon . . .). Some of them are ghost stories, others are atmospheric mysteries or dark, twisty tales inspired by folklore, but for some time now I have wanted to write my own version of a proper Victorian ghost story. The Boy at the Window is just that – a creeping, unsettling, atmospheric ghost story with a spine-chilling twist at the end: the sort of tale that gets under your skin. There were a few gothic conventions I particularly wanted to play with – a handful of spooky ingredients I added to my story cauldron: an isolated setting, a profound feeling of loss and uncertainty, and the idea of a doppelgänger. I was also really interested in exploring alternative ideas of what ghosts might actually be . . .
I was inspired by ghost stories such as The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M R James, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, and by the film The Others. I wrote the first draft in that strange gap between Christmas and New Year, when the days are dark and time seems to hold its breath. A friend of mine had just started having piano lessons and, lying awake one night, I began to play with an idea for a story: a boy who is forced to learn the piano – and his relief when a mysterious child offers to take the lessons in his place.
Although the style of The Boy at the Window is inspired by the 19th Century ghost stories we all love, this is a Barrington Stoke book, so the language is accessible and dyslexia-friendly. It’s short enough to read aloud in class, and has fantastically spooky illustrations by the artist Rohan Eason.
The setting of the story is based on the rural saltmarsh near where I live in Kent. We get wonderfully atmospheric mists on the marshland, and I loved the idea of a remote house shrouded in fog – what that fog might represent, and the secrets that might be lurking in the gloom.
When I talk about writing in schools, I always encourage students to think beyond the plot of their stories, and to consider a big idea or theme they might want to explore. With The Boy at the Window I wanted to address that particular kind of grief that comes with not knowing the fate of a loved one – how the not-knowing suspends us in time and the sense of loss never truly settles. With my main character Hugo, his isolation and sense of self are important too: the distance that grows between Hugo and his mother; how she expects him to be someone he isn’t; how she barely knows or sees him at all . . .
