Every story has a hinterland. A place it comes from before you know what it is. For The Tarn, that hinterland was the English Lake District; its dark peaks, its folktales, and a ghost story I’d half-remembered for nearly thirty years.
The Memory That Started It
The idea germinated in the back of my mind long before I wrote a word. I thought I’d read a tale about a boatman who terrorised Windermere. In my memory, a hooded figure loomed like the ferryman to Hades. But when I looked the old story up, my memory had deceived me. There was no hooded figure in it at all.
It didn’t matter. The real tale of a ferryman who crossed Windermere one stormy night to answer a mysterious voice calling over the water, returning alone, pale, and unable to speak, and dying hours later, was unsettling enough to do the job. My misremembering had given me a ghost. The original tale had given me the atmosphere.
That combination became the cornerstone of The Tarn.
A Place I Love
I spent years living in the Lake District and walking its hills. Tarns always fascinated me. Dark patches of unfathomable water dropped amongst the craggy rocks and windy peaks. On a sunny day, the surface shatters into a thousand diamonds. On a grey one, it lies flat and blank as slate. They are beautiful and, frankly, a little unnerving.
It would have been impossible to write a ghost story and not set it there.
The story follows Hugh and Esme, a couple who travel up to a remote bungalow Hugh has inherited from his uncle, tucked at the head of a valley near Keswick, a small tarn at the bottom of the garden. It opens with a drive up the M6, an argument, and the car cresting the ridge to reveal “a particularly dark patch, flanked on three sides by the sheer slopes of the scree strewn valley wall.” That dark patch is the tarn.
I wanted readers to feel the place. The beauty of it, and the quiet menace lurking underneath.
The MR James Blueprint
I came to write The Tarn after reading the collected ghost stories of MR James. James was an academic at King’s College Cambridge, writing at the start of the twentieth century. His stories are spine-tingling, precise, and utterly English.
Crucially, he left a blueprint. An everyday setting. A malevolent ghost. Normal people thrown into abnormal circumstances. A “nicely managed crescendo” of tension. Objects as vehicles of evil. And above all, reticence. “Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.”
What I didn’t know when I wrote The Tarn was that I’d already been following his rules. I only read his thoughts on the craft after I’d finished. The story is set somewhere off the beaten track near Keswick. The central characters are a couple in their early thirties with a mortgage and an argument about what to do with an inherited property. And the vehicle of evil is a small silk ribbon — a Thuggee garrotte — that Hugh finds on his uncle’s study floor. An ancient object, unremarkable to look at, terrifying in what it demands.
What the Story Does
I won’t say too much. But the garrotte has rules. A price. And once Hugh touches it, the clock starts. He has two nights to make a sacrifice, or the hooded figure haunting the tarn will take him instead.
“So, what you’re telling me is that you’ve got till tonight to kill someone, or you die tonight?”
That exchange between Hugh and Esme is close to what I attempted to make the whole story to feel like. Ordinary people, an extraordinary situation, and the desperate, darkly comic scramble to survive it.
How I Wrote It
I just hammered out a first draft. No outline, no plan. I sat down and wrote until I had something to work with.
Then the real work began. I went through it again and again. Deleted large sections. Added new ones. Rewrote passages until the pacing felt right and the tension built the way James described — that slow, deliberate crescendo that starts with “a placid scene, undisturbed by forebodings” and ends somewhere much darker.
The Lake District, for all its beauty, is full of stories like this one. Lost souls in Easedale Tarn. The faces of the dead staring up from Codale. A spirit at Alcock Tarn that appears in the mist on moonlit evenings. None of those tales made it directly into The Tarn, but they are the soil it grew from.
That soil is old and well worth exploring. Fertile, one might say.
The Tarn is available now. You can find it here.