“If I could speak the language of rabbits, they would be amazed, and I would be their king. I would be kind to my rabbit subjects. At first.” Rajesh Koothrappali, Big Bang Theory
Have you ever played a Simulator game? One where you create a community, placing homes, stores, a hospital, a flower shop, and so on, wherever you feel they should go?
If you have, if you’ve enjoyed your god-like powers to shape your community in whatever way pleases you, you’ll understand a little of what it’s like being a fiction writer. Especially someone who writes fantasy or paranormal stories.
Many authors create a ‘community’ that our protagonist lives in, and where the action takes place. Cabot Cove in the Murder She Wrote television series (a ‘cozy’ town that I certainly wouldn’t want to live in, because everybody gets murdered!), or Kembleford in the Father Brown television series, are classic examples.
I’ve done the same with my town of Llithfaen. It was interesting to make up a town that sits on three ley lines and is prone to hauntings and other weird things, together with a small college where courses in esoteric subjects are taught and there’s a library with a restricted floor that houses a collection of amazing ancient artifacts.
My imaginary town has to follow some rules, though. It must have streets and homes, and shops and services that sustain its residents, such as a hospital where the physicians are used to some very strange cases. There’s a library with an unusual window with an Egyptian motif, a carousel that could fill your nightmares, and a bookstore that I quite literally dreamt about for years and finally brought to life in my novels. (More about that in another post!)
Atmosphere is critical in paranormal and horror novels, of course. My town of Llithfaen was founded by Brother Domitian, a travelling monk from Wales who’d had something of a classical education. His legacy appears in many of the later place names, such as Hermes Square, Demeter Street, and Aenon Cemetery. And because he grew up in medieval Wales, there are numerous stone-walled passageways around the rabbit-warren of streets in the centre of town.
All places evolve, even small towns. Later additions to the town, such as the railroad tracks and train station, added an industrial flavour, along with the Winchester Tile Factory. After the trains no longer traversed such a remote community and the factory shut down, it transformed into a modern condo building that Rad Enkara, the college’s archeology professor, lives in. Several retired train cars were repurposed as the Hobo Lounge restaurant out in the woods east of Grey Marsh.
The surrounding waters add a murky marine atmosphere, especially the Marsh, where nothing lives except the nasty green Wraiths. The marina on the Acheron River adjacent to Chimera Park is a bustling place on warm spring and summer days, but the old Carrigan Boatworks on the other side of the bridge have been closed up ever since a destructive attack by a mysterious monster decades ago.
It’s not as easy as you might think to fashion an entire town, but it is fun.
I created an informal map in PowerPoint, which I’m very familiar with, so that I could lay out everything that had to fit within the parameters of that little pocket of weirdness. It allowed me to be consistent in my novels, and also to plot the action in various scenes that move around the town.
And when my beta readers asked for the map of the town, and of the college campus, to be included in the books, I was gratified that they were so interested in the details of what I’d created.
All writers have influences, and I mentioned one of my largest last week: H.P. Lovecraft. The alternate version of New England that he wrote was so powerful that, like the Sherlock Holmes stories, many readers became convinced that it was real. I think that’s what every writer hopes for, to have that kind of impact.
Lovecraft created his own weird town, Arkham, and even sketched out a map for reference. Thirty years later, my single greatest influence, heavily impacted in its own turn by Lovecraft’s writing, was the first supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows, set in the eerie town of Collinsport. To this day, I have a thing for the ambience of towns and villages near water.
If you’ve only ever seen Tim Burton’s movie version, for the love of all that’s unholy, don’t go by that – it doesn’t represent the original series well at all. (Sorry Tim, but I’m afraid the comedic approach didn’t work.)
I still remember the first day my brother and I came across Dark Shadows on the telly, and the intro of dark crashing waves and eerie theme music began to play, segueing into an image of the Collinwood Mansion shrouded in fog. Whenever we watched each episode, that intro catapulted us into the strange world of the soap as we waited impatiently to find out what was going to happen next.
Dark Shadows aired weekdays on the ABC network from June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971. The show centred around the lives and tribulations of the wealthy but rather cursed Collins family of a town in Maine named after them. It was originally supposed to be a largely gothic family saga, but wasn’t doing well enough in the ratings, so the writers began introducing a few supernatural elements, and that transmuted the entire show into something dark, dangerous and exciting.
The tortured family vampire, 175-year-old Barnabas Collins, who was accidentally released from his coffin partway into the first season, made the show a cult hit for the ages. Barnabas was played by a little-known Canadian actor, Jonathan Frid, who, although not conventionally good-looking, captured his character’s angst and menace so well that he became the unlikely romantic hero of the show.
The supernatural focus then became the main driver of the plots on the show, exploring ghosts, werewolves, witches and warlocks, time travel and many other ideas cribbed from classic horror stories.
The town of Collinsport provided so much atmosphere for the series. Every great story has an intensely evocative setting, and it was certainly so on Dark Shadows.
It all begins with Victoria Winters, an orphan who journeys by train to the mysterious town of Collinsport, Maine, to unravel the mysteries of her past. Her employer is Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (played by veteran actress Joan Bennett with great gravitas), who lives in an enormous gothic mansion overlooking the sea. Elizabeth’s brother, Roger Collins, a widower, also lives in the house with his troubled son David, as well as Elizabeth’s headstrong daughter Carolyn Stoddard, and a rather grim-looking housekeeper.
Julia Hoffman is the local doctor who earnestly but annoyingly meddles in everything. Willie Loomis is the hapless groundskeeper who, searching for treasure, lets ancestor Barnabas Collins out of his coffin to terrorize Collinsport. Many other characters make regular appearances in their places of business or as victims of the curse that seems to afflict both the Collins family and their town.
Collinwood Mansion is the main setting. The huge Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island was used for the intro, as Collinwood contains over 40 rooms, although, like the gothic novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, many of them are closed off in more modern times. As in any good gothic mansion, there are also secret passageways, rooms that alter depending on who enters them, and a time-traveling stairway.
Because of all the rumours about the mansion, most of Collinsport’s residents are afraid to even drive by it.
Although most of the action takes place in the large foyer, where an imposing portrait of Barnabas Collins hangs, its grand staircase, and the sitting room with big windows, a massive fireplace and a dry bar with crystal decanters so that everyone can pop back much-needed liquors after all the peculiar things that happen, the rest of the mansion is fully fleshed out. We also see the garden terrace and various parts of the grounds where people are usually running in fear, as well as the original mansion on the estate, into which Barnabas, now posing as his own descendant newly arrived from the U.K., moves into.
I think Dark Shadows was unique not only in its premise but also in how much it spread the plots not only through the weird mansion but also to many parts of the town.
The Collinsport Inn is a three-story inn located on the main street. A tavern called the Blue Whale is a regular haunt for the town, and for Carolyn Stoddard when she’s feeling rebellious. It’s famous for some of the very best seafood in the area. Braithwaite & Sons are the local jewelers and silversmiths, one of whom was portrayed by a pre-Barney Miller Abe Vigoda. In fact, quite a few early actors in this series went on to achieve later fame, so it’s fun to pick them out while watching.
There’s a department store, general store, hospital, Eagle Hill Cemetery (where Barnabas was entombed), a beach called Lookout Point, fog-filled alleyways where Barnabas attacks his victims, and so much more.
One shop that became my favourite place in the series is a cozy antique store owned by Philip and Megan Todd. In the ‘Leviathans’ plot line, which embroiled many of the residents of Collinwood and Collinsport in a scenario inspired directly by H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods mythos, the baby monster is taken in by the Todds and housed in a locked room above the shop, where it goes through increasingly older iterations until finally the adult creature manifests as the dangerously attractive Jeb Hawkes. Jeb becomes obsessed with beautiful Carolyn as soon as he lays eyes on her, and decides to change the rules so that he can have her. We never see Jeb’s true form as the Leviathan, only hear its terrifying breathing behind the old wooden door in the antique shop.
I’ve read that the Leviathan plot line wasn’t very popular, but my brother, mother (she got hooked on the show as well) and I loved it – so twisty and romantic.
Dark Shadows was filmed live, so there were no retakes if the props malfunctioned or an actor fumbled their lines (which happened quite often, although they were all adept at covering their slip-ups). The special effects of ghostly manifestations, witchy powers, horrifying dreams and the like look very dated now, but the show was powerfully effective at the time and has a dedicated fan base to this day.
In many ways, the town of Llithfaen is my equivalent to Collinsport, with the Wychwood estate subbing in for Collinwood. It’s been a pure delight to pay homage to my beloved old TV series, which gave me so much joy when I was younger so that I could pass that along to all of my readers.
I chose to avoid the gothic or Victorian clichés for my creepy mansion, Wychwood. On one of our road trips I came across a mansion in Ontario that was white in colour but just had a certain ‘look’ to it, which I described in book one of the trilogy. I’m not going to reveal where it is, so that the owners never get any fans trying to see it personally.
My hubby and I visited one of the Dark Shadows locations, from one of the companion movies. The estate is called Lyndhurst, in the Hudson River Valley in NY State. We couldn’t take photos inside, but I here’s an external shot for you. Some day I’d love to go to the Carey Mansion, even just to see the outside, which was so iconic in the original series.
For those of you who’ve finished the Chaos Roads trilogy, there will be more to come about uncanny Llithfaen this fall in my next novel, The Summer Door, wherein another resident of Llithfaen becomes involved in a dark and baleful romance of her own.
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