You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.
Hilary Mantel, “Giving up the Ghost”
On a Thursday evening as a wallop of snow hit the city, acclaimed author Andrew Pyper joined The Varsity for a beer in the back room of The Ossington, a bar just down the street from his home. The room was spare, lined along one wall by some mismatched seating, and lit by a naked, two-watt candle bulb atop an unshaded lamp. Not an unsuitable setting for discussing Pyper’s latest novel, in which the characters live a waking nightmare in the cellar of an abandoned house. We settled into wooden chairs facing one another and placed our pint glasses on the floor.
When we meet, The Guardians has been on shelves for only a few days and Pyper is looking forward to the book’s launch the week after. In particular, he anticipates the chance to share the new work with his friends. Perhaps the most autobiographical of his novels, The Guardians takes place in the fictional town of Grimshaw, which Pyper based on his hometown of Stratford, Ontario (or Stratford minus the Shakespeare Festival). The book is about four friends — Carl, Ben, Randy, and Trevor — who experienced a series of horrific events the year they played for the Grimshaw Guardians hockey team. Ben commits suicide decades later and the remaining three return to the town. They are forced to confront their dark secret — and the empty house Ben watched from his bedroom window every day for 24 years — when it seems past events are repeating themselves. The story is told in chapters alternating between the present from the perspective of 40-year-old Trevor, who has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and entries from Trevor’s “memory diary,” which he keeps as a future aid against the effects of the disease. It’s bleak, and scary.
“Even though it’s a novel with a couple of murders in it and a ghost and some scenes that, if I’ve done my job, are frightening, and a town that’s painted in a way that you wouldn’t ever want to live there, it’s actually really meant as a gesture of love for my friends,” Pyper says. “I just can’t do love conventionally?”
AMY JIN/THE VARSITY
If The Virgin Suicides were a ghost story written by Henry James and filmed by Guy Maddin, you might have something approximating The Guardians, though that description doesn’t do justice to Pyper’s skill in arranging a plot that once set in motion, propels itself by it’s own energy until we reach the end and can only look back to what led us here. This is at least one reason why the movies so love his books, several of which (Lost Girls, The Killing Circle, The Wildfire Season) are on their way to the silver screen. The Guardians has already been optioned for film.
For someone whose novels peer into the dark and then look closer, Pyper is surprisingly cheerful. He laughs frequently during the interview and seems happy to finally get to talk about how he’s going to scare you out of your skin.
THE VARSITY
I wanted to start off by talking about something that I’ve noticed cropping up in your books repeatedly, which is this interest in the uncanny. Especially I was interested in this house you have in the novel. I was thinking of it as a literal definition of the unheimlich: this home that is unhomely. It’s familiar, it’s like all the houses that these boys grew up in, but what bothers them so much about it is that nobody lives there. What interested you in this house? What made you pick it up in this novel?
ANDREW PYPER
There was for a long time an interest in writing a haunted-house story, but I needed to do something different with it. I didn’t set out to reinvent the story, because that trope is useful and regenerative on its own, but I needed to marry it to something else, and it took a while, some years, actually, to have that eureka moment of aligning in many respects a quite conventional haunted house story with preoccupations of masculinity and aging and male friendship and these other concerns I had that I was toying around with. So it cleaves in two ways: it cleaves temporally in the way the structure of the novel works, but it also cleaves in that on the one hand, there are questions of a conventional literary kind, i.e., aging, and what is it to be a man alive in 2011, and all those concerns, and on the other hand, it’s a horror novel. It was the marriage of those two things that I thought, “Here’s a way of regenerating this trope …”
THE VARSITY
But make this haunted house my own?
ANDREW PYPER
Exactly. I make it my own through peopling it as opposed to creating some kind of totally original mythology. So it’s the people who go into the house. And the house, as you pointed out, what’s unique about it is its vacancy, and it’s how they project into that house that’s interesting.
[pullquote]ANDREW PYPER: I think everyone remembers their teenage years as particularly horrific.[/pullquote]
[pullquote]THE VARSITY: They maybe didn’t bury the music teacher in the cellar.[/pullquote]
[pullquote]ANDREW PYPER: God, I hope not, no! [/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
You talk about the cleaving of the story into the literary concerns and the horror novel. It’s almost as if you’re examining the normal through the extremely weird. Did you approach the novel in that way? Was it that you wanted to talk about these four guys who are in their forties, they’re aging, they’re looking back on their lives, and it just so happened they had particularly horrific teenage years? Or was it that this death created this chain reaction of events and they can only really resolve those issues now that they’re older and more mature?
I have to believe that some of the things all of us did when we were young were strange. So strange that in recollection they strike us as the products of distorted dreams. Later, we may work to untangle these dreams, dismiss them, grapple with their meanings so that we might “move on.” Or, more usually, we do our best to ignore them, to discount them as that-which-never-actually-happened. But they did. The bullying and being bullied, the greater or lesser perversities, the violence done to others and to us — all of it real.
ANDREW PYPER
Well, I think you’ve helped me by articulating better than I could probably not just the central theme of this novel, but now that I think of it, all of them, which is, how did you put it? Exploring the normal through the weird. I think everyone remembers their teenage years as particularly horrific.
THE VARSITY
They maybe didn’t bury the music teacher in the cellar.
ANDREW PYPER
God, I hope not, no! But at the time, it feels like you’re enduring unique horrors and, more to the point, whatever you’re enduring is a secret. That’s a hallmark of adolescence that I wanted to get across: that the secrets obviously aren’t as dark as the ones my characters experience, but metaphorically speaking, this is the terrain of adolescence, that feeling of “I’m the only person who’s ever felt this before” or “This experience that me and my friends have experienced is a secret that we hold. There’s no way that I could take this home with me or that I could share it with my parents.” That divide, even if you look back on it — “Oh that was ridiculous! How harmless!” — at the time, it isolates you. That’s I think the way in: It’s not that you can’t relate to these people because what they’ve undergone is so remote from what most people experience. On the contrary: the way they deal with this experience, regardless of what that dark secret is, is the way that North American adolescents deal with it. It’s immaterial what the horror is.
THE VARSITY
And you still have to learn those mechanisms of “How do I act normal?”
ANDREW PYPER
Yeah! Exactly. It’s about acting normal. In a way, it’s the beginning of theatre. In life one moves into adulthood and working life and professionalism, and to one degree or another, one adopts a careerist pose. Increasingly life is a matter of theatre, of masks. In a way, adolescence is the bridge between that pure honesty and play of childhood and this very practiced — it feels natural, but really, what you never regain is that naturalism of youth. So these guys are just now learning, quite painfully, as we all do, what it is to put on a mask, and how necessary it is, and how uncomfortable that can be.
THE VARSITY
I think it’s Trevor’s father who says, “The friends that you have in your youth are your friends for life.” But it seems that one of the questions the novel asks is “How well can you know somebody?” Trevor thinks he knows these guys pretty well, but for each of them, by the end of the novel, he discovers that he maybe didn’t read them quite as well as he thought.
ANDREW PYPER
I think the mistake that Trevor makes is one that many of us make in close friendships, which is assuming that what makes us close is that we’ve experienced the same things. The presumption is we’ve gone through that experience with the same lessons, it’s altered us in essentially the same way. That’s the error. There can be an intimacy through shared experience. Probably the most acute one that men undergo, historically speaking, is war. And yet, as we know, a platoon can come home if they’re lucky enough to survive war, and some people can resume seemingly happy, “normal” lives, and some are emotionally destroyed forever. The experience is the same, but the emotional results, the effects, are different. Friendship is obviously a more complicated thing than merely “We were all there together! See? Look at that photograph: there we are, smiling! That’s friendship.” No, that’s just a representation of unity, when friendship, like any relationship, is much more mysterious and unreadable than that.
[pullquote]In an essential way, I’m still scared of the dark. Because it’s in the pure darkness that I can most fully imagine, and that’s the scary stuff.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
You see that with these four guys. In the house there’s a boy, and the four friends all seem to experience him in different ways. Somebody asks, “You’ve seen the boy. What does he look like?” And it’s not clear that he looks the same to everyone.
ANDREW PYPER
Well, exactly. The boy is not just a reflection of them, he may in fact ultimately be them in the sense that he exists through their energies. In literature and the cinema, ghosts have a certain fogginess. Well, this ghost isn’t foggy. He’s a chameleon, he’s a shape-shifter in a way. That’s what the house is: a house of mirrors in that you will see in it horrific things, but those horrific things ultimately come from yourself. They’re distortions, they may not be true, but they are all self-generated. Which is why, in an essential way, I’m still scared of the dark. Because it’s in the pure darkness that I can most fully imagine, and that’s the scary stuff.
THE VARSITY
On the subject of the boy, I found it difficult to put together cause and effect of how his reality is invented within the novel’s space. On the one hand, he does seem to be an invention of these boys’ imaginations, their desires running rampant in this house. But is he of the boys, or is he external, bringing these desires out of them?
ANDREW PYPER
I think he is a creation of their imaginations even though he has a “real” history.
Maybe to attack the question in a different way: There are bad people out there. In a way, the history of moral philosophy, of law, of penal theory, of government is really one long story of: What do we do with bad people? How do we organize them? How do we judge them? What makes them bad? I think this is an endlessly fascinating area. But what we know for sure is that there are bad people, regardless of all the other questions that arise from it.
The boy is a bad person. Why is he bad? Well, who knows.
THE VARSITY
We don’t know.
ANDREW PYPER
We don’t really know. And if someone were to do something unspeakably awful to my daughter, I don’t think I’d really care much about the why. All I know is — and I know this already — there are bad people out there. That’s all I really need to know in a practical vein.
[pullquote]It’s a satanic voice, ultimately. But it’s also a very honest voice. It’s saying, ‘The DENIAL of the thing you want is surely the dishonest move.’[/pullquote]
The boy is someone who enacted thoughts: that’s what ultimately made him bad. And I think the living boys in the novel have probably similar thoughts to those of the boy. The difference is they don’t enact them. We all have thoughts that, were we to enact them, it would be unspeakable and cruel and we’d all end up in prison. But we don’t. And that’s the membrane — the membrane between the thinking and not doing, and the doing — where all moral action takes place. It’s a very thin line. That’s why when the boy speaks in their heads, what he’s really saying is “All this stuff that prevents you from action: let it go.” It’s a satanic voice ultimately, right? But it’s also a very honest voice. It’s saying, “You have a thought, you have a desire. You want that thing. Simply take it. There’s no more honest gesture than that, the taking of something you want. The denial of the thing you want is surely the dishonest move.” These are the methods, the rhetorical play, that there’s something deeply compelling about. As a matter of discourse, it’s Biblical and then some in terms of how long man has imagined this dialogue, this internal debate: the angel on the one shoulder and the devil on the other.
So it’s a long way of saying I see the boy as another Guardian. He’s one of them, but he is the one who went all the way.
AMY JIN/THE VARSITY
THE VARSITY
Just by virtue of the fact that the characters are teenagers, that seems to create this domino effect in the plot: were they even maybe five years older, there might be some voice of reason to stop them from unleashing this chain reaction. I’ve read that you’re somebody who is fairly detailed in your outlining before you start writing a book.
ANDREW PYPER
Well, I am a evangelical advocate for outlining, in part because my novels, they are plotted, they do have a pretty clear working engine that powers the story, and the more effective that engine is, the better for the other stuff that I want to do, which is all the other stuff that one associates with the novel: characterization, development of theme, etc. “Mechanics” makes it seem a necessary evil, but it’s actually an aspect of the book that I hold in equal if not greater esteem than all the other “literary” things that we claim to read novels for.
There are things that you can do in the range of a story, the sequence of events, that go beyond merely, oh, hooking the reader, this kind of screenplay language that we’re all now, for whatever reason, familiar with. I’m not saying you couldn’t map that onto my books. Of course you could. But I don’t think of it in that way. It’s not a matter of form, it’s a matter of: Is there a way to take sequential experience, the way that all of us necessarily experience life, and rearrange it — I really do nothing more magical than that — in a way that not just enhances the readerly experience, but that brings out something in the story that will enhance its impact?
In the case of The Guardians, for example: starting the novel. Where you start the novel is so important, and again, it’s not just a matter of hooking the reader. For me it just sets the tone for the whole book, it’s what that first note on the piano will say about the last note. And so starting the novel with these boys, we don’t know who they are yet, they’re looking through a window and seeing police arrive — initially one policeman who runs out of the house terrified, we don’t know why, and then the ambulance arrives and there are the two body bags that come out and the boys seem to know what’s going on.
Yes, I think it’s intriguing, it’s mysterious, but the most interesting aspect of that for me is the way the curtains smell. You can imagine these terrified, trembling adolescent boys breathing in the smell of these curtains and watching this scene of horror. And it’s the curtains to me that are the most interesting because it puts you in the smell of a deep fryer, of those lonely after-school afternoons growing up in a small town. It’s the particularity of the world that they’re inhabiting that I think, okay, that’s the tone. Yes, there’s a hook: Who’s in the body bags? Why’d they go into the house? Did somebody kill them? Yes, yes, yes. But it’s the loneliness of the curtains [laughs] and that depressing deep-fryer smell that is seeped into the fabric — that’s the tonal importance.
We stood together, watching. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of the McAuliffe house across the way. Our noses grazing the diaphanous material that smelled of recently burned bacon and, deeper still, a succession of dinners scooped out of the deep fryer. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finally emerged from the house with the black bags laid out on gurneys — one, and then the smaller other — we held our breaths. A gulp of French fry, onion ring and chicken finger that, to this day, is the taste of loss.
THE VARSITY
The beginning actually reminded me a lot of The Virgin Suicides.
ANDREW PYPER
Yeah! Definitely.
THE VARSITY
Same kind of idea of looking out of the window across the street at these EMS trucks converging on this house. The boys in the case of The Guardians have a better idea of what’s going on, but they’re still trying to piece together some things.
ANDREW PYPER
It’s one of those things where it’s not until a late stage in the process where you realize, “This is sort of a visual echo of The Virgin Suicides!” Then you think, “Oh, do I have to take — I guess I should remove that.” And then you think, “Well, no…”
THE VARSITY
It’s not a copycat.
ANDREW PYPER
Yeah. There’s a respectful subconscious reenactment, in a way.
THE VARSITY
It also draws to the fore the way that the two books are very different.
[pullquote]That impulse to be good can get you into as much trouble as the impulse to be bad.[/pullquote]
ANDREW PYPER
Well, that’s it. The Virgin Suicides is in many respects, in terms of the recording of the chorus of boys, a novel of passivity. The boys, aside from yearning, do really very little.
THE VARSITY
[laughs]
They collect.
ANDREW PYPER
They collect. And, oh, they pine. But they don’t do too much.
THE VARSITY
It’s hard to imagine them on a hockey team.
ANDREW PYPER
Yeah, oh my God, no, in hockey they would just wilt. [laughs] Or, even though they desire those Virgin Suicide girls, if the erotic dreams that they have were to be made real, they would explode. Or not even explode — that would be too much. They would disintegrate. Whereas my guys are tragically active. Their thing is they’ve been looking, waiting for an excuse to be chivalric and to get in there, and prove themselves through action, real action, action that can make a difference! That impulse to be good [laughs] — that impulse to be good can often get you into almost as much trouble as the impulse to be bad.
THE VARSITY
All the violence that happens in that house has its root in desire for women, whether it’s violence done against women or done against men for the sake of a woman, and it ranges from lust to love. The boys say they love Heather, they want to avenge her death, but Trevor also takes a pretty long look at her corpse. It’s not to say that he is that person who would take those actions to kill her, but all of the characters seem to have that root within them, whether they acknowledge it or not.
ANDREW PYPER
No, I think you’re right, and that was certainly my intent. Every good ghost story, every good story of the paranormal, has at its heart the uncanny, which is fuelled by the subconscious, and the subconscious is fuelled by a small set of preoccupations, sex obviously being a primary one, and then it’s a pretty short list.
[pullquote]Paul Bernardo probably had a pretty good imagination. The greatest villains of history are, if nothing else, pretty creative people. True villainy requires capable imaginations.[/pullquote]
But particularly for these boys, they are generationally just before the present culture, which, however one actually experiences it, is on the surface this Girls Gone Wild benignly pornographic culture. I know it’s more complicated than this, but certainly in the face of it there’s a relatively lax approach to sexuality that these guys would have been astonished by. Their generation belongs to the last of the pre-Internet generation. Merely clicking and looking: their minds would have been blown by the Internet in terms of pornographic access alone. So in the present day when they go to the Internet café and they access pictures of Tracy, which are quite innocent, Trevor can’t handle this.
This is all to say that the house is for them a site for an enactment of their desires. And the presumption is that they all desire Heather and love her. Well, no, as it turns out, desire can take different directions and can have a different character, but it all stems from “Where do you put that powerful energy if it doesn’t have anywhere to go?” A psychological place to put it is a haunted house. The cost of that, though, is that when you place those desires in a house of mirrors, it doesn’t always go as you planned. You know, now that I think of it, The Killing Circle, my previous novel, is a novel about professional desire, creative desire and it’s darker aspects. All those things we consider to be, you know, “That’s benign: the imagination.” If you watch Disney movies, that’s what they’re always talking about: “Use your imagination.” “All you have to do is believe, and you can fly,” says Peter Pan. And yet, every single time I watch those films, I think, “Paul Bernardo probably had a pretty good imagination. The greatest villains of real history are, if nothing else, pretty creative people. True villainy requires capable imaginations.” That is an interest of mine, that counterpoint: every energy, you believe it can be contained, you think, “I’ll merely direct it in this — ” but all of these things are less attainable than you think.
THE VARSITY
Well, and the other problem, too: if three of the four leave, and one is left with this house in his hands, it almost inevitably means that the other three have to go back to address that. What was the inspiration for the town?
[pullquote]Even though it’s a novel with a couple murders and a ghost and a town that you wouldn’t ever want to live there, it’s meant as a gesture of love for my friends. I just can’t do love conventionally? [/pullquote]
ANDREW PYPER
I grew up in Stratford, Ontario, and Grimshaw in a way — talk about a house of mirrors — it’s sort of a distorted version of my memory of growing up in Stratford if you took the Stratford Festival out of it, which really was the way we experienced it at the time. Growing up there, the idea that there’s a world-class Shakespearean theatre in your town — that was not part of the texture of our lives at all, especially in the winters, which were long and boring and, for us anyway, fuelled by driving around in whoever’s car you could get and smoking a lot of drugs and getting into minor scrapes. “Shakespeare who?” I know I’m going to get in trouble for this because it’s going to be “That’s not like Stratford!” or “I live in a small town, and you make small towns seem like these ugly, evil places.” My rebuttal would be, no, this is Trevor’s point of view, but it’s also mine in that it’s how I remember a particular aspect of growing up. And because it’s an adolescent point of view, it would be bleak if I’d grown up in Beverly Hills. It would be the pain and tortures of sunny California. It’s the nature of perspective. It’s not the place that’s twisted and dark.
THE VARSITY
Have many of your friends from high school read the book yet?
ANDREW PYPER
Mm-hm. Yeah. Only one has spoken to me about it and he loved it, so I’m one for one. Even though it’s a novel with a couple of murders in it and a ghost and some scenes that, if I’ve done my job, are frightening, and a town that’s painted in a way that you wouldn’t ever want to live there, it’s actually really meant as a gesture of love for my friends. I just can’t do love conventionally? [laughs] They have enough sense of irony to understand that this isn’t a non-fictional portrayal of Stratford, Ontario. This is a highly ironic and fictionalized depiction of it.
THE VARSITY
You talked earlier about trying to scare the reader. When you’re outlining how the plot is going to work, do you also try to track the reader’s emotional response?
ANDREW PYPER
For sure, yes, there are various decisions at a pretty early stage of how hard you want to go with that. In an earlier draft there were more scenes and sequences that were merely scare-making in their intent. After getting some early editorial responses, I ended up pulling back. Not because the scenes were offensive, but those readers rightly thought that those scenes, while effective, were louder than the quieter, more central concerns of these characters and this friendship, the way a dark secret eats at them. All those quieter concerns were being killed by my “Ok,” [rubs hands together with glee] “Let’s really scare the shit out of the kid this time!” It became a question of striking the right balance, so that those scenes didn’t drown out those other concerns, but at the same time, they were effective.
But I do plot out. There should be a big progression to the way the scares happen so that there shouldn’t be the same thing twice unless there’s a reason for it. In the case of the house, it’s a unique haunted-house story in that in most haunted house stories, people move into a house; They don’t know it’s haunted! They bought it for a song; Slowly they begin to learn that this dream house is not what they expected; Really, it’s about getting out of the house.
The problem with that for me has always been “Why don’t they just leave?” The first time a demon tells you to get out or someone vomits on your shirt or blood comes down the walls, you’d be out of there.
THE VARSITY
Get a room at the motel.
ANDREW PYPER
[laughs]
Yeah! There’s lots of good motels around. In this case, of course, it’s an empty house and these people are safely outside of it, but it’s about perceptions or events that conspire to bring them in. So instead of “You have to get out of the house!” this is “Don’t go into the house!”
THE VARSITY
But you will go anyway.
ANDREW PYPER
But you will do! You will go anyways. So it was fun from an architectural, plotting point of view to plot out those movements from looking through windows, seeing glimpses of things through the windows, then seeing, no, undeniably that is a human figure in the window. What is that figure doing? Messages on the windows. There’s a lot of play with windows, because a window is transparent, but there’s this safety in that those events are happening on the other side.
THE VARSITY
And no broken windows, hey?
ANDREW PYPER
No! Good point. No, didn’t think of that ’til now. I couldn’t say I intended that —
THE VARSITY
You can have it.
ANDREW PYPER
[laughs]
No, there are no broken windows. But then, there is no reason to go in this house — unless you make one. And that’s why I think these guys need the Thurman house as much as the Thurman house and the boy need them. I think that’s the nature of badness generally: every neighbourhood and every small town does have a haunted house, because they need it.
… there is a haunted house in every boy’s life. A place where all the wants he is not yet old enough to act upon or even understand can be rehearsed or hidden away. A place he fears because he can sense its endlessness, how it reaches back into the pasts of other boys before him, as well as his own.
We need to have a site for our fears. And if we don’t have it, we’ll make one up anyway.
