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Bloody Book Club, our monthly series of interviews with horror authors, welcomes Daisy Johnson, author of the short story collection The Hotel
Johnson, who has been called “the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King," Johnson is the author of short story collection Fen and the novels Everything Under, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Sisters, which was recently adapted into the film SEPTEMBER SAYS, which is screening at the BFI London Film Festival this month. Her new book is a collection of interconnected short stories swirling around a haunted hotel in the Fens, a place of mythos, rumours and secrets.
The Hotel is out on October 17th. You can also listen to it on Radio 4.
Johnson, who has been called “the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King," Johnson is the author of short story collection Fen and the novels Everything Under, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Sisters, which was recently adapted into the film SEPTEMBER SAYS, which is screening at the BFI London Film Festival this month. Her new book is a collection of interconnected short stories swirling around a haunted hotel in the Fens, a place of mythos, rumours and secrets.
The Hotel is out on October 17th. You can also listen to it on Radio 4.
Artwork by Ewa Ferdynus
Music: "Time to Leave" by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Final Girls: A Horror Film Podcast?
A weekly podcast dedicated to exploring horror film and TV history through a female lens. Each series we dissect a trope to death through deep dive conversations hosted by film critic and author Anna Bogutskaya.
It is not possible with any certainty to go to the hotel and feel safe. It is not wise to ever do so. Welcome to the Final Girls podcast,
Anna Bogutskaya:where we watch horror films and read horror books. This is Anna Bugatskaya, your podcast host. If this is your first time listening, we usually cover horror film history on this main feed of the podcast and notable new horror releases over on Patreon. Alongside our film coverage, every month or so, I interview some of the most exciting people who are writing horror right now under the banner Bloody Book Club. We're in between seasons here in the podcast, so I'm bringing you bonus weekly buddy book club episodes to tide you over.
Anna Bogutskaya:In this episode, I talked to author Daisy Johnson who has been called, dramatically, the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Johnson is the author of short story collection, pen and the novels, Everything Under, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Sisters, which was recently adapted into the film, September Says, which is screening at the BFI London Film Festival this month. Her new book called The Hotel is a collection of interconnected short stories swirling around a haunted hotel in the Fens, a place of myths, rumors, and secrets. In our conversation, we spoke about loving horror and hating roller coasters, the appeal of hotels for horror fiction, and the looming shadow of Stephen King's The Shining. The hotel is out in bookshops next week and you can also hear previous iteration of these stories as a Radio 4 series, which you can find in the BBC website or the BBC Sounds app.
Anna Bogutskaya:And with all of that said, please enjoy my conversation with author Daisy Johnson. Daisy, thank you so much for your time this morning. I've been a fan of your writing for some time now, so it really is a pleasure to speak to you, about 6 hours after I devoured your latest book.
Daisy Johnson:Oh, it's so good to be here. That is very swift. Well done.
Anna Bogutskaya:So I I'm gonna start by asking you the question that I ask every single one of my guests on the show, which is what is your own personal relationship to horror?
Daisy Johnson:My and my answer is actually always the same, which is that, I was born on Halloween, and I think quite early on, my parents really, held on to this as a really good party theme. So we would have, like, every birthday, we'd have big feasts with, like, you know, sausages labeled as witch's fingers or twiglets as witch's fingers or, like, eyeballs, which were pickled eggs. And then at some point, we started having kind of birthday film nights. So we would watch, I guess, Carrie or The Shining or, Don't Look Now. Probably, I think, now having had my own children, too early.
Daisy Johnson:Especially Don't Look Now. Like, I remember very, vividly watching the sex scene of Don't It Now with my dad and feeling awful. But, so yeah, from quite a young age, I really loved horror and really loved the adrenaline feeling, of being scared and of like waiting to be scared. And was really interested, I guess, as I became interested in writing and interested in reading, I was interested in how you could possibly make someone feel that way. Like, it felt so clever to me, I think, as a child and as a teenager.
Anna Bogutskaya:It's really I mean, the most disturbing thing about what you just said was watching the sex scene from Don't Look Now with your dad, because it's one of the best sex scenes that was filmed, I think, in the history of cinema. And that is a very traumatic way to experience it for the first time.
Daisy Johnson:It's such a good sex scene, and it's been entirely ruined for me now. I think I can't.
Anna Bogutskaya:I'm very sorry.
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. He kind of narrated before it happened, what was gonna happen, I think to warn me, but actually, that was even worse. And I think he said something like that. He said, this is an event, you know, this is a really well filmed sex scene or something. And I was like, oh, my God.
Anna Bogutskaya:Don't tell me that, Diane. You have never had sex.
Daisy Johnson:Exactly. You've had sex three times and you did not like it. Yeah. So that stuck with me. But then also I do remember from that film, like, you know, the the reveal at the end Mhmm.
Daisy Johnson:With the and like what how that felt to watch that probably already filled with adrenaline for watching the sex scene with my dad. But yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:And it's interesting, you know, that you bring up the cleverness or the ability of horror, either on the screen or on the page, to elicit feelings, to create feelings in the reader and the audience. And what do you think about, what sort of feelings are you looking to create with your writing?
Daisy Johnson:That's a really good question. I think it's something I'm still discovering and certainly is different with every book and every short story. And, I think often it is, I guess, a feeling of waiting for something to happen. Turning within yourself of realising that something is about to happen or realising that something has already happened or realising that we've misunderstood something. I think I really love twists because of that.
Daisy Johnson:You know, I think there's a there's a real way of connecting to a reader where they begin to understand that maybe they don't understand, something quite right. And often they're with the character in that misunderstanding. And I think, I'm really interested in how writing can do that, how writing can kind of link us kind of in not comprehending something with the character. Yeah. If that makes sense.
Anna Bogutskaya:That makes complete sense. And and kind of getting more specifically into The Hotel, which is this new interweave short story collection that you've got coming out now, What is the feeling that you wanted a reader to experience with this collection in particular?
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. I think The Hotel is interesting to me, among my other writing because it was originally written for audio. Mhmm. So the way that I thought about it was thought about, you know, was kind of that someone was going to be listening to it, you know, in that way that we do listen to radio. So I'm not always paying close attention or coming in and out.
Daisy Johnson:And so I wanted there to be a kind of, I guess a sort of snappiness to the stories. Mhmm. A kind of I'd like a way of trying to hold attention. And then it's been interesting seeing it sort turn into a book and doing some edits on it and trying to think about how it looks on the page. And I guess I want each story in the way that they connect together to have that kind of moment of realization of like, oh, we've seen this character before.
Daisy Johnson:And I think things like that don't it doesn't matter if you don't realize that as a reader, but I love that kind of Easter egg feeling of like, oh, I see this link that they've made here and this is going to connect to here. And, I think that for me as a reader is really exciting when you begin to see the sort of threads that hold things together. And I definitely wanted this to be a collection where it, you know, time is sort of flattened in it. You know, we go backwards and we go forwards and you could probably easily read it from the end and go back to the beginning. And yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:Yeah. I that was one of the great surprises for me as well reading it, is those as those connections started revealing themselves, it was these really nifty surprises. And I think it also changes your the way you read. Because when you read short stories, you automatically assume that even if there is a connective tissue, they're kind of independent of one another. So suddenly seeing these connections come through becomes it sort of changes your relationship with the book.
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. I hope it does. And I think I also really wanted them to be I like, I wanted them to be short stories you could read, you know, separate as well. Like, I think that was definitely something I went into the collection wanting to do and what I tried to do in my first collection, Fen, as well, was that I wanted them to be something you could pick up and you could turn to any story and you could read it and it would feel whole and complete. But then when you read them together, they become something different.
Daisy Johnson:Like that kind of felt a bit like a, and I hope it's achieved it, but it kind of like a magic trick, you know, that they exist in these 2 different states, both as short stories and as something bigger.
Anna Bogutskaya:Yeah. Absolutely. That's definitely the feeling that I got after after I finished it. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about this process of essentially writing the same project, but for 2 radically different mediums. So this was originally a Radio 4 series.
Anna Bogutskaya:Right?
Daisy Johnson:Mhmm. That's right. Yeah. The yeah. They did a kind of I don't know if they do it anymore, but then for a couple of years, they asked writers to write kind of these connected, things.
Daisy Johnson:And, John MacGregor did one and the writer, Simon Jones did one. And they said, they kind of opened up and said, I could write anything I wanted to. Yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:And tell me a little bit about this experience of, you know, you you alluded to it before, the difference of writing for something to be listened and something to be performed, versus writing for the page. How did you find your did you find yourself writing differently when you were writing for it to be a radio show play, a series, and then adapting it yourself for the page?
Daisy Johnson:I think I did write it differently, partly just because I was working, I guess, for someone in a way that I don't normally do when I'm writing something. So I wrote them really, really fast. This is probably the fastest thing I've ever written. And then I guess also wrote them very much with like, like I always read my writing aloud, sometimes as I'm writing and then definitely towards the end, but these I read aloud all the way through. And really tried to think about, you know, like how the sentences sound and what the character might sound like.
Daisy Johnson:And then sort of towards the end of project, when I was kind of talking to the, the Radio 4 producer, it was amazing because, you know, she say things like, I think we're going to get this actor, and this actor is from, you know, Nigeria rather than Ethiopia. So shall we think about that? And then go back through the stories and thinking, how does that change the stories? Or like, you know, this writer is, is Scottish rather than Northern. And that would be, it's potentially a good thing to think about in any writing, but was really helpful for this.
Daisy Johnson:And then there was one story that changed that I edited quite a lot and the rest of them have had minimal edits, but mostly just gone onto the page as they were, on the audio. And it was something I was really nervous about because I felt like I'd written them for audio, but then actually going over them going over them, I think that it's I think and I hope that it's translated well to the page. Like, I think it has given it a kind of feeling of, you know, I guess horror stories are such a, an auditory thing. You know, like I remember sitting, you know, locking my brother and sister in a dark bathroom and turning off the lights and telling them these ghost stories that I've made up. Or, you know, sitting around a campfire and telling these stories.
Daisy Johnson:And I think, for me, that's why as soon as they said said, you know, can you write some linked stories for the radio? I thought, well, it has to be ghost stories because, you know, those are the stories that we tell out loud. And so I hope that that's translated to the page in a way that, you know, you kind of feel like someone is set up as it you telling you these stories, which hopefully is quite creepy.
Anna Bogutskaya:It definitely was creepy. And I loved, you know, like I said, I think before, I read it sort of in one sitting late last night, and I got that feeling of of being in a campfire and hearing these stories. And I'd listened to the radio 4 some episodes of the radio 4 show, but sort of not in order. So reading them kind of in the order that you had laid them out in the book was a completely different experience. And I'm wondering, you know, when you mentioned you read out loud your writing and these ones in particular and with the experience of writing, it essentially to be performed.
Anna Bogutskaya:Do you find yourself performing your writing? And were you, you know, at all involved in the, maybe not in the casting, but in the direction of the performers who were reading your writing out loud?
Daisy Johnson:I definitely do perform my writing when I'm reading it out loud. And I work in a shed at the bottom of the garden. So it's isolated from the house and no one can hear me and I definitely, you know, do the dialogue. And I think that is potentially, like, the only way, I don't know if you find this, but that you can feel where sentences aren't right, or that's where I always catch where there's, like, too much repetition, you know, like, I've used the word bone too many times or
Anna Bogutskaya:like 100%.
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. And I think, it's just it's just a different way of thinking, I think. And, I think about, you know, how someone might perform my writing if they were gonna do the audio book, when I'm reading out loud. With this with the, hotel, I didn't have anything to do with the direction, but I did have, something to do with the casting. Like, you know, we kind of talked about who might be the dream characters for each one and what ages we wanted, and and I think they've done an amazing job.
Daisy Johnson:Like, I think they've got such, they've got such good cast for it. And each one is kind of different and unique. And that was really exciting because I don't think I'm one of those writers, like I know some writers, you know, have pictures above their above their desk of like, oh, this character is this actor or this character looks like this politician. I definitely don't do that, like, at all. So it was really interesting suddenly them having voices, if not also faces.
Anna Bogutskaya:I I kinda wanna move into the the the bones now that you now that you mentioned the word bone, into the bones of the hotel. There is such a long tradition in horror of bad places. Bad places, bad houses, bad earth, like, bad spots in the world that just create madness and create fear. What appeals to you about kind of places like that?
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. I am obsessed with them in a in a probably slightly unhealthy way. And that I find that quite frightening, I think. And I think what for me, I recently wrote a piece of the Feet about hotels. And I think, like, beginning to think about why I find I've always found hotels really uncanny and uncomfortable, and I love the idea of them, you know, like the idea of leaving your house and going somewhere and just sleeping and having a bath is really exciting.
Daisy Johnson:But when I get there, I always feel very on edge. And I think it's something about, particularly the hotel, something about this kind of pretense of home, which I guess is is a wider thing about places in horror, which is so frightening. You know, this idea of, like, we're supposed to be safe in our homes and we're supposed to be safe in our holiday houses and we're supposed to be safe in hotels and we're supposed to be safe in public spaces. And I think horror really uncovers like how much that is just a complete facade. And I think in, in the space of the hotel for me, it's very quickly uncovered, you know, hotels pretend to be homes and they've got they've got beds and they've got toilets and they've got kettles and we kind of, we act with our bodies there as if they're our homes, you know, as if we can lock the door, but someone has always got another key to our hotel room.
Daisy Johnson:And I think sometimes that's true of our homes. You know, sometimes this kind of idea of, like, oh, we're safe is actually, you know, someone has always metaphorically got another key and that might be because the very ground underneath it is kind of is disturbed or something has happened there or, yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:Yeah. I'm I'm really fascinated with hotels too. Just, like, I love staying in them, partly, I think, because I find them really creepy and unsettling as well. And I I think they do sort of change us when we check-in, when we're there. They're these transitionary spaces, but also they are kind of weirdly exhibitionist spaces in a way.
Anna Bogutskaya:Because you're constantly not only does someone many people have access to your room, so you're never in complete privacy. Anybody can come in at any time. So that is already a terrifying prospect. But also, I think it weirdly changes the way that we relate to the space because they're almost, you know, a home away from home seems like a a comforting idea. But I find that people really change when they be when they check into a hotel, the way that they behave.
Anna Bogutskaya:You're not really treating those rooms in the same way as you would your home. And you kind of, I guess, allow yourself different kinds of indulgences or behavior when you're in a hotel because it is this it's no one's space. It's not yours. It's not even the space of the people who work there. It's like, you know, this invisible billionaire who probably owns them.
Anna Bogutskaya:And then these rooms just don't have a personality of their own. They just absorb the personality of these millions of people that go through them, Which if you spend too much time thinking about that, like I do every time I check into a hotel, it's sort of overwhelming and quite gross.
Daisy Johnson:Mhmm. Yeah. It is pretty gross. And like, and I think especially in, you know, places like Premier Inns or hotels, where there are these kind of like, you know, like rows upon rows upon rows upon rows of rooms. You're so close to one another and like, and you can hear one another through the walls.
Daisy Johnson:You can hear people's televisions, you can hear people's conversations. And like also there's always a sense that someone else has been there. You know, like even if the hotel has been cleaned, you know, you, you find someone's hair tie there or like you find someone's shampoo bottle or like, I think I think you're right. I think they're so transitory. And I think you're definitely right as well.
Daisy Johnson:There's a feeling I know I definitely have this, you know, when I go to a hotel, I eat so badly. Like, I drink too much wine, even though I'm on my own. And like there's a there is a kind of feeling of like you're out of time. Mhmm. But I think that's true of houses, you know, like the way we act in our house, you know, like we feel like it's ours, but someone lived there before or, or once the house wasn't there and it was just a field.
Daisy Johnson:And it, like, I think in many ways, houses are kind of just, you know, transitory in the same way. Like I live in a semi detached house and we can always hit the person through the wall, you know, like you can hear the person's like the neighbours sneezing through the wall. And like, it's sometimes I become aware of like that feeling of, that this is not our space in the hotel. I think that translates to all buildings. Like I think we have to pretend that there are spaces to feel safe.
Daisy Johnson:Mhmm. And to raise our families in them and to work in them. But I think that kind of, yeah, like once these houses weren't here and the land belonged to someone else or some other creature or yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:And in the book, you know, there you make so many allusions to sort of ghost tourism or to people who gravitate towards these bad places, and even towards the most haunted spots in the haunted places, like Room 63 is constantly alluded to throughout the throughout the book. What is your perspective on them? You know, is this something that you, why is it something that you wanted to incorporate, particularly across different moments in time and different kinds of I'm trying to find a non snarky way because I'm not trying to be snarky about ghost tourists. But I think ghost tourists might probably be the best way to describe these characters.
Daisy Johnson:Mhmm. I am definitely not one of those people. Like, I, would never be, you know, someone who, we, like, lived in York for a bit and there were, like, all over. They were like, oh, this is the most haunted pub or, like, this is the most haunted hotel and you can go and stay in this room. And I would never be one of those people.
Daisy Johnson:Like, I think it's it's madness. But I guess, I do understand the thrill of being scared and that I suppose that kind of sense of like picking a scab of something or like, you know, testing the boundaries, of something. And I definitely, I suppose wanted to wanted the hotel to be somewhere really frightening and really dangerous, but also in some ways, somewhere desirous, I guess, like kind of to balance on this, this line between like revulsion and obsession. Mhmm. So there are people who come back there over and over again and they can't stop themselves and they don't quite know why, but they keep going there.
Daisy Johnson:And I suppose it's, there's something fascinating about like finding the stepping up to that light line of something really frightening and like trying to peer over. And I then, yeah, I think that that is really, to some people, certainly not to me, like, I don't like the idea of being actually scared. But, but I can certainly see why some why some people, you know, it's like going on a roller coaster, I guess, which I think is also an awful thing to do. But, I can understand why some people would want to. Do you like going on roller coasters?
Anna Bogutskaya:I hate it, and yet I am compelled to do it. So if there's a roller coaster, I will go on it. And every time, in the moment, the seconds before it drops down, I despise myself in that moment. And I think, why am I doing this to myself? Including one on Coney Island, which is quite a famous I forget the name of it now, but it's quite a famous, really rickety wooden roller coaster.
Anna Bogutskaya:Like, it was built years ago, and it so clearly looks unsafe and insane. And I demanded to go on it. And I don't know why I'm built this way. Maybe I'm also a ghost tourist. But, you know, I think there's always an underlying interest, I think.
Anna Bogutskaya:I think it's a fundamental human interest of wanting to know what happens to us after we die. And underneath all of that, the weird and kind of contradictory desire to peer over, into into potential danger, is that sense of, well, at least I'll know. At least I'll know that there's something else.
Daisy Johnson:Mhmm. Yeah. And I guess for me, there is nothing comforting in that. I don't like, I think I would rather not know. Because what what if you peer over and you'd see that it is something awful or it's not what you wanted it to be.
Daisy Johnson:But I guess both you and I must have some of that roller coaster thing inside of us because I think that is what horror is, right? It's like Totally. It's lead is kind of convincing your body that something bad is about to happen. Mhmm. And so I went I've been on a roller coaster once.
Daisy Johnson:I don't know why I'm talking about roller coaster so much. It feels like really bad for, but, I went on a roller coaster once as an adult. And, like, in the moments before it got really bad, that was when I liked it. And then as soon as it started going really fast, and I was like flying all over the place, I was like, this is horrible. But it was like that sort of it was that kind of moment.
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. And I think that's the horror I really like is like, you almost maybe nothing actually happens. You know, like I think some writers like Stephen King and I grew up on Stephen King, but sometimes like to you you're on the roller coaster too much, you know, like you see the clown or like you see the dead woman in the bath. And I think the horror I love is like the feeling of maybe there isn't actually anything here, but I feel like something is about to be here.
Anna Bogutskaya:Yeah. It's the, it's the expectation. It's the peering over. It's not what you see.
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. But I think that peering over the idea of peering over and finding all that happens after we die, that is too much for me, I think. And if there was like a button, would would you press the button if there was a button? I would.
Anna Bogutskaya:I have to say I would. Yeah. I think I I'm kind of maybe my eyeballs will just disintegrate because we're not ready we're not able to comprehend the eternity of the afterlife or something, or it's gonna look like a Brian Yuzna or a John Carpenter movie. But at least I'll know. For a millisecond, I'll know.
Anna Bogutskaya:And unfortunately, I'm just too curious for my own good. I would wanna dive deep into that.
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. You have to know.
Anna Bogutskaya:And I feel like I have to ask, as a movie person and as a horror movie person at that, about the biggest horror hotel in culture, which is obviously The Shining, which you mentioned before. And I think we both grew up on Stephen King, you know, that manor is responsible for at least 2 generations of horror fans, horror writers, horror filmmakers. Was The Shining an influence or at least a presence for you when you were thinking of writing the hotel?
Daisy Johnson:Oh, yeah. Of course. And, yeah. The Shining was the first Stephen King I ever read. Again, far too young.
Daisy Johnson:And I was I was obsessed with it. I don't know what it was about to be. And I was obsessed with it. And I was obsessed with it. I don't know what it was about it, but I, so I discovered that, Stephen King doesn't like The Shining film.
Daisy Johnson:And so I decided I was going to, I guess I must have been 13. I decided I was going to write my own screenplay of the shining film. So I started kind of going through the book and making all these notes in the margins. And my dad was like, but there's already a shining film. And I was like, yeah, but Stephen King doesn't like that shining film.
Daisy Johnson:And he will like my shining film.
Anna Bogutskaya:That is so adorable.
Anna Bogutskaya:I love it so much.
Daisy Johnson:And definitely when I thought about setting, I knew I wanted it to be ghost stories. And when I decided it was gonna be a hotel, I was like, I don't think like it can be a hotel because what about the overlook? Like, is it possible to do another one? And I kind of decided that actually that was good and that it was fun to write something where there was already this massive shadow behind it and this, like, expectation that people go into it thinking this is gonna be something frightening. And it's a very different frightening hotel, I think.
Daisy Johnson:Mhmm. But, yeah, I definitely can't lie and say that I've never read The Shining.
Anna Bogutskaya:And, you know, when you were thinking of the hotel, and I you know, there's multiple stories that really spoke out to me from the from the collect from the book. But the description of the hotel is so it's wide enough that you can picture something, you know, a hotel or a building that creeped you out particularly, but then it's it's also kind of its own personality. And you even, give it you gender the hotel. The hotel is a mother. The hotel is sort of this woman, female figure.
Anna Bogutskaya:Can you tell me a little bit about describing or imagining the hotel and the rules of its, of its evilness?
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. So I think probably at very basic beginning level, the evilness is I suppose, ecological and linked to, you know, what we do to the land and what we have done to the land. And so the hotel begins as nothing, it begins just as earth. And even then there is something in the ground and that was exciting to me. I think that, yeah, what if there's something in the ground, potentially something that we have either put there or is that, or is answering to the things that we have done to the earth?
Daisy Johnson:And what if, in in that kind of stubborn human way, we build a building on it? What is that building like? And I thought a lot about what the hotel looked like in a way that I don't often do. I think when I describe places like I will always have a very strong image in my head of what it looks like, but I want the reader to have their own image. But I definitely, you know, like, Googled hotels and Googled, kind of, eras and thought about when it was built and what it would look like.
Daisy Johnson:But I definitely also want it to feel, yeah. So, the final story, spoiler, but it doesn't really matter about spoilers, I don't think in this, but is, is kind of, I guess a Blair Witch esque, you know, camera shots. And, and I think I wanted it to feel a bit like that, you know, like you catch flashes of it, but you can never be entirely sure what it is. And sometimes it is bodily and, you know, sometimes the stones are ribs or the, or the roof is ahead and, and sometimes it isn't. And, and sometimes it feels safe and sometimes it feels good.
Daisy Johnson:And then you turn a corner and it very clearly isn't that. And I think I wanted it to be kind of that, you know, like quick cut Mhmm. Feeling of like a bad camera film. Mhmm. Yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:And, you know, one of those things as well that works that worked really well for me in the book was this shifting sense of perspective. So all the changes of point of view from the story, sometimes, from the hotel's point of view itself or from the the creatures or the ghosts that live in it. What did those shifts of perspective allow you to do with with ghost stories?
Daisy Johnson:They were so fun to write, and I and I hope fun to read. I, I just wanted it to take it like a step further along, I think. And like, I think a lot of the stories are about how, how like expansive the hotel's reach is, you know, like people who've never even been there think about it. And and I so I think I also wanted to see what was inside of it and take that thing and look at that story. And I think that's, you know, that's, that story feels to be quite different from the other ones in many ways.
Daisy Johnson:And it's definitely kind of, you know, inspired by kind of Kelly link stories and like Karen Russell stories of like, what if we actually see something that is there? What if we take that to its logical conclusion and run with it? And it was also fun to me, I think writing that story that a character from other stories is kind of taken into it. You know, this kind of feeling of, I guess, like things smashing together or lines blurring or like time, time becoming kind of curled round or flattened. Yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:And we've spoken about people who characters who deliberately seek out these places, who deliberately seek out the hotel. But what was interesting is that there's quite a few stories, quite a few characters where, they don't want to be at the hotel. They have no interest in room 63 or in being there. They have to be there usually out of necessity because of work or whatnot. How do you think that for you changes the relationship of a character with a haunted place?
Daisy Johnson:I think I those are the characters I'm always really interested in. They're the people who are just in situations because there's no other possibility. You know? And I think, I really I guess one of the other reasons I'm interested in houses and buildings is because it feels like, like the time and the place that we live at the moment is so difficult to hold onto somewhere to live. Rent is so high and mortgages so high and bills are so high and like there's a real feeling of like scrabbling against awful landlords and like a real feeling of like any of us could at any point not have enough money to afford the electricity bills.
Daisy Johnson:And so I think that feeling of like some people just have to be there and that's really scary. I think like the idea of, what if you are so frightened, but you can't leave. And I guess that is the real clever allure of the Overlook Hotel is that they literally can't go anywhere or certainly Danny, the little boy can't go anywhere. Mhmm. You know, and like even now that kind of gives me chills, like, because there's always a feeling of like you go to a hotel and you check-in, but you can definitely check out again.
Daisy Johnson:And what if for whatever reason you can't check out again?
Anna Bogutskaya:It's one of the simplest but most powerful inversions of the haunted house story, I think. You know, haunted home in any way is it's not it it's the ability to keep you there, But very real life situations keep you there. Like you said, bills, obligations. You know, one film that I really loved from the last couple of years called His House, and that is about 2 political refugees that cannot leave the house that has been assigned to them, or they will lose their political asylum. So even as everything is all the freaky shit is happening around them, they have to stay there, because of larger, very human and political reasons.
Anna Bogutskaya:So I love that. That feels like a really lovely note to wrap up on. But I do just have one last question. In one of the stories, the story that's from the point of view of the hotel itself, you write about the hotel as a mother. And I was wondering where that came from.
Anna Bogutskaya:Kind of how did that come to you?
Daisy Johnson:Yeah. I was thinking about this when you mentioned it before, and I don't know, but mothers appear in everything I write and, they have done for like the 10 years I've been writing. There's always a mother in there. And the mother is often one of those people who is in a situation that she can't get out of, but she can't leave because, because she's got a child. And I am now a mother and I wasn't a mother when I wrote the hotel, but there is definitely, I guess, that feeling of like being a mother is very uncanny to me, like the experience of being pregnant or, having IVF or adopting or like I think is a very uncanny and unsettling place to be in.
Daisy Johnson:And then this feeling of seeing this child grow and they are part of you and part of someone else and you have to look after them is enormous and you can't leave, you know, you can never leave again. And so I think for me that, you know, the figure of the mother is a haunted figure. And so the hotel was always going to be a mother, I think.
Anna Bogutskaya:That's lovely, Daisy. Thank you so much. And just as a as a recommendation, is there a book or a short story that you think readers who will enjoy the hotel might wanna check out after reading your book?
Daisy Johnson:So and I don't know if I'm gonna get the name right. So, maybe I'll have to double check it, but you and I have spoken about Miranda July before. And she's not a horror writer, but she is my, absolute, you know, I think she is so amazing. And she really, for me, like rides that line of domesticity and weirdness and how weird it is to be a person. And there's one, there's one story which she, has written.
Daisy Johnson:I don't think it's published in a collection, but you can, she reads out loud on the New Yorker. You can listen to it. And it really, for me, does that saying of, like, you as a reader are like, something's happening. I'm not quite sure it is. And then you have that real, like, gasp moment of realization at the end.
Daisy Johnson:And I think there is potentially no one else who does it as well as she does in the story. It's called, The Metal Bowl by Miranda July, and I, really recommend it.
Anna Bogutskaya:Okay. I haven't read I haven't read or listened to that one. I'm gonna check it out today.
Daisy Johnson:Let me know if you like it. I think it's amazing. Yeah.
Anna Bogutskaya:Thank you so much for your time.
Daisy Johnson:Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.