Goodreads asked Ryan Hoyt:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Ryan Hoyt I came up with the idea for Raventree Hollow on a Sunday morning in July 2020. I had been reading through Shirley Jackson's catalog for several months by that point after a few years of reading several Stephen King books per year. I was really taken aback by Jackson's wide range of stories. She's often labeled as a horror writer to the point that I've seen negative reviews of Haunting of Hill House in recent years because people expected it to be a certain thing, and it was something else to them. But really she is so much more than a writer of horror tropes. There's terror behind the domesticity of so many of her short stories as well as in her novels like The Road Through the Wall. One story in particular that really drew me in was The Possibility of Evil. I wanted more of that story, but at the same time I felt as connected with that story in its few short pages as I was with the entirety of King's gigantic novel Needful Things, which I also love. This story started to form in my mind after that, and it took on a life of its own from there.

It wasn't always going to become what the last act of the book turned into. Originally it was just supposed to be this big farcical ending with nothing supernatural involved, and it may have been more Jackson-esque that way, but I moved away from my original ideas as I continued to plug away at teh story. I hope you enjoy it for what it is, but also see the strong roots of influence from Shirley Jackson in those early chapters.

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