My latest book, When Ghosts Call Us Home, is a novel about being haunted by memory and possessed by art. It’s also about complicated families and an unravelling bond between two sisters. I used there literary devices – embedded narratives and found objects – as storytelling drivers to bring the novel’s main ideas and themes to life.
Embedded narratives and found objects can take a variety of forms, from fictitious books or scripts, which exist solely within the confines of the novel, to actual, physical ‘objects’ written into the narrative to add to the story. Nesting dolls or assemblage in visual arts offer useful metaphors, the latter referring to the process of augmenting flat surfaces with 3D objects, and the former evoking complex, multi-layered formats of stories contained within stories.
A notable example of a novel constructed with help of found objects comes from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, a novel inspired by vintage photographs the author found at second-hand shops as a child. Riggs recalls frequenting these shops with his grandmother and being taken by the found photographs’ disturbing uncanniness, wondering as to their backstories, to the point that the photographs inspired the book and even graced its pages.
Found objects can take a variety of other shapes and forms, from a flowchart telling a story of a family in Alex McElroy’s “The Death of Your Son: A Flow Chart” to chronicling the events of a protagonist’s life via colours in Kristen Ploetz’s “LifeColor Indoor Latex Paints®—Whites and Reds” to Lawrence Sutin’s “A Postcard Memoir”, which includes postcard reproductions alongside short sections of memoir, creating a rich narrative by pairing words with evocative imagery.
As Grant Faulker writes, “a found text always has a complicating or dramatically expansive layer,” giving further examples of ‘found object’ stories written in the format of customer reviews, guest entry logs as well as recipes, outlines, shopping lists and technical manuals.
Using embedded narratives and found objects in storytelling creates postmodern fictions, which simulate authenticity, enacting a simulacra of realness, making the fictional worlds more complex and therefore believable. Think epistolary formats imitating letters and journal entries or documents like HR files and classified reports, which all help create an illusion of real life captured on page.
In When Ghosts Call Us Home, the novel’s protagonist, Sophia Galich, is searching for her missing older sister, Layla, whose disappearance may be linked to Vermillion, a found footage amateur horror movie Layla directed five years ago. As a child, Sophia became Vermillion’s unwitting star, the movie then taking off as a viral underground sensation. Now Sophia’s memories of filming Vermillion with her sister at a seaside mansion called Cashore House, their former home, cannot be trusted. Was it all set up by Layla, with clever props and special effects? Or was young Sophia really terrorised by Cashore’s sinister entity, Layla capturing the haunting on film? Was Sophia safe while her sister’s camera was rolling or did Layla put her life in danger?
The sisters’ lives are connected to the movie they have created together. But they are not the only ones—Vermillion has spawned an army of admirers whose dedication borders on problematic, and Sophia suspects that Layla was taken by an obsessive fan.
The cinema’s found footage genre, most famously popularised by The Blair Witch Project, translates itself well to the written medium—video transcripts embedded into the text of the novel can supplement or replace parts of the narrative. In my novel, this style of storytelling is further enhanced by including social media snippets and excerpts from online forums (modelled after Reddit) where Vermillion’s fans congregate to discuss their theories about the messages hidden in the film. Embedded alongside the first-person narration, the forums serve as a repository of urban lore Sophia relies on as she deciphers the clues around Layla’s disappearance. At the same time, the transcripts of Sophia’s video journals give the reader spooky insights into the inner workings of Sophia’s mind, establishing her unreliability as a narrator who can’t trust her own thoughts.
Seeing the murky past through the kaleidoscopic lens of her unreliable recollections, Sophia decides to return to Cashore and re-enact Vermillion’s key scenes, in hopes that doing so will rejig her memory and help her find clues as to Layla’s whereabouts.
The horror film at the centre of the novel works as an embedded narrative, the sequence of its scenes driving the structure of the novel as Sophia’s memories start to return and change her understanding of what happened in the past. This driver propels the novel forward as the story of two sisters is told and retold in connection to the movie they have made together, each scene corresponding to an aspect of their relationship and their choices leading up to Layla’s disappearance.
For example, as Sophia braves the eerie rockpools at the bottom of the cliffs, where one of the most terrifying sequences of Vermillion was filmed, her narration shifts to remembering being on set five years ago, her sister haunting the periphery:
I’m twelve again, going down these steps… the setting sun’s golden glow turning tarnished pink, then dark red, promising a cold night and even colder morning. Layla made me carry a lit lantern; rustic and heavy, it hurts my strained fingers, but I’m not going to let it go. I can’t. Filming my descent to the pools, my sister is a silent presence, just off the rocky path in the thickening dark. I hear her as she balances precariously on the flatter sections of the cliffside,
her feet slipping dangerously against the dewy shrubbery.
Shocked by how much she’s remembering, more of unsettling details emerging as she nears the rockpools, Sophia recalls how that scene morphed into a nightmare:
I no longer hear my sister’s presence next to me. She’s gone, vanished into the night. The lantern’s weight in my hand is replaced by something soft, slippery, and very, very cold.
A hand, fingers wrapped around mine… My fear is a living thing. It latched itself to my neck and now it drinks, taking my life force away, locking me into this limited state of existence.
I can only move my eyes, but barely so. Not enough to see what leads me.
Just like her younger self, today’s Sophia wants to believe it was Layla’s hand leading her down, even if deep inside she knows it was something else. Just like then, Layla remains a silent presence in Sophia’s life, her gravity keeping Sophia tethered. As, scene by scene, Sophia relives her experience from five years ago, she’s beginning to see Vermillion as something other than Layla’s creative project and her sister as something other than a teen genius. These revelations propel the story forward.
My main inspirations for When Ghosts Call Us Home were the novels Night Film by Marisha Pessl and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, both of which explore the idea of haunted art and deploy the embedded story techniques, experimenting with structure, format, and themes. But I have started experimenting with found objects and embedded narratives earlier in my craft.
In my debut novel, What The Woods Keep, introducing ‘found documents’ into the otherwise first-person narrative allowed me to fill the gaps in the backstories of the characters. I have used textual artefacts of letters and dossier files to show to the reader the extent of the mystery the protagonist was grappling with, building tension as the novel raced to its climax. I also used therapy notes of my protagonist’s psychologist in order to initiate the reader into the deeper levels of the mystery at hand.
In another example, in her horror novel The Girls Are Never Gone about a podcaster investigating a grisly haunted house mystery, Sarah Glenn Marsh interlaces the podcast’s transcripts with the unfolding narrative told by the main character. The podcast (the embedded narrative itself, each of its transcribed episodes a ‘found object’) drives the story forward, taking advantage of the natural creepiness of the idea that technology can capture sounds and images a human perception might miss. Transcript tags indicating sound distortions, overlapping voices and so on are used brilliantly to maximize tension and create a truly unsettling experience for the reader that feels just real enough, if not a little too real.
Discussing the process of embedding found objects into fiction Christopher J. Robinson writes how it’s the author’s job to engage the reader in the process of discovery, to inspire the reader to tease out the stories contained within these objects:
I don’t want stories where the author tells the reader everything. A good story (and, indeed, good art) contains gaps which must be filled by the reader (or viewer). A good story requires active participation from the reader, it asks for input from the reader’s imagination.
And so, the author can use found objects as locations of clues the reader can find, allowing the reader to actively participate in the storytelling by finding the hidden links within the story and filling the gaps.
In When Ghosts Call Us Home I invite the readers to submerge themselves into the world of Vermilion, Cashore house and the Galich sisters, at their own risk. The found footage of Layla’s horror film inevitably leaks into the real world, threatening to highjack Sophia’s mind and her entire life. Sophia’s process of reconstructing Vermilion scene by sinister scene at the location where the original was filmed creates a false sense of safety via familiarity, but as Sophia ventures deeper and deeper into her lost memories, it eventually becomes obvious how much danger she’s really in, and always was. At the same time, the online commentary and fan-made artefacts surrounding Vermillion create additional dimensions of reliability, while the ever-present technology, camera’s eye never stopping its surveillance, reminds us there’s always been ghosts in the machine.
Katya de Becerra was born in Russia, studied in California, lived in Peru, and then stayed in Australia long enough to become a local. She was going to be an Egyptologist when she grew up, but instead she earned a PhD in Anthropology. She is the author of YA horror-thrillers When Ghosts Call Us Home, What The Woods Keep, Oasis, and the forthcoming They Watch From Below. www.katyadebecerra.com
Thank you.