Your book blends psychological trauma, paranormal elements, and mystery. What inspired you to bring these threads together into one story?

Reality, I guess. I think when traumatic experiences are triggered by a particular environment or event, then the unraveling that follows can thin out the line between reality and illusion. Apart from that, when wounds are reopened and lying raw, then we are more sensitive and with it more receptive. All of that, I think, opens us up to paranormal experiences. Or at least to experiences that we are forced to perceive or want to perceive as paranormal and mysterious.


The novel explores guilt, grief, and obsession in very intimate ways. Were any of these themes drawn from your own life or observations?:

I think every writer draws from their own life or observations, that's the point. I also think that grief and guilt can easily lead to obsessions of any kind, an unhealthy coping mechanism that ruins entire lives. And, yes, it is true that the exploration of these motives is very intimate in the book. I wanted this one to be deeply personal, I wanted it to hurt when I wrote it, I needed it to be raw. I am touching on all of my own traumas in it, because I wanted to be one of those authors who are brave enough to face themselves and put their entire soul and spirit into a book. The most touching stories ever written all have a deep intimacy and rawness in common, the feeling that you can taste the tears of whoever wrote them while you are reading them. That was what I was aiming for, and by God, did I cry.

You describe this as your first mystery novel, and that it’s based on real events. Could you share how much of the story is rooted in reality and how much is fictionalized?

The main storyline is honestly very close to what actually happened. I changed the timelines a bit, and adjusted the characters. They are obviously not real people but closely oriented on actual people I know or knew. I tried to intensify and deepen things like the love theme and also the paranormal parts of the novel, but all in all the story is closer to real life than it probably should be or will seem to readers.


Many passages feel deeply personal and almost confessional. Was writing this story a cathartic process for you?

You know what, I was actually just thinking about exactly this for a long time, because I realized that it truly was. I literally still start crying when I read certain parts of it, but not in a desperate way, it is more a deliberating kind of crying now, like I faced my deepest abyss and can now say goodbye to it and move on from it.


The relationships in the book are layered with longing, regret, and power struggles. How did you approach writing such complex emotional dynamics?

I think this was less a case of approaching them as an author and more a case of living through them as a person (laughs). Emotions in real life have never truly only one layer, there are always multiple layers to every feeling we feel. At least when we allow ourselves to truly feel them. And that is what I tried to do when writing them, just feel.


There’s a strong sense of place in the novel: apartments, streets, abandoned buildings all carry weight and atmosphere. Did you base these settings on real locations?

Most of them, yes. Not that towns in particular really matter to the impact of the story, but in case anyone was wondering, the main settings for the real events that the novel is based on were the two Irish towns Killaloe and Nenagh, both of which I stayed in when I started writing the book.


The supernatural elements (Ouija boards, spirits, shadows, possessions) are written with unsettling realism. Do you personally believe in the paranormal?

I do. I find it ignorant to just dismiss that there might be things out there that the human mind cannot make any sense of or that our perception of things is even the right one. All of us are limited in what we perceive of the world, because human perception in general is flawed and biased with prior experiences, emotions and expectations. And knowing that what we perceive is never truly what is, how can we then ever rule out that there is more out there than we see or hear?


At its core, the book seems to be about how the past never truly leaves us. What do you hope readers will take away about memory and haunting?

I hope that this book will help others to find the courage that it takes to face what truly shattered you and try to let it go entirely instead of holding on to it in order to fight it.


Now that you’ve written your first mystery, do you plan to continue in this genre, or return to your “big love”, socio-critical novellas?

Oh, I have written mysteries before, just not mysteries that were based on real events. But it´s true, my big love as a writer are deeply symbolic and socio-crytical novellas. Just for the simple fact that I feel like writers are under the obligation to comment on their time, its obstacles and problems, and in our time we have enough of them to write a million novellas.