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A Modern Theme
Zara’s Gothic follows a paramedic who, after a life-altering road accident, retreats to a secluded property where she lives in a handmade van beneath the shadow of an abandoned Victorian house. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
I have always wanted to write a gothic novel, being most inspired by Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions. I was taken by the sight of an old, crumbling house, now in its last stages of collapse. It spoke to me. Maybe the story is a way to preserve the house’s memory.
What drew you to combining paramedic trauma with Gothic haunting?
Although I love the standard repertoire, I wanted a modern theme people could relate to. And, something different, something unique.
Zara’s inner world feels intensely sensory and unstable—how did you approach writing her perception?
It is said that there is a normal. I believe there are other ways of perception. Zara’s on the outside because she’s not like ‘normal’ people. The book is dedicated to Professor Elaine Aron, whose pioneering work on HSP, highly sensitive people, tells us that there is nothing wrong with ultra-sensitivity. It exists in humans and animals; it is not a mental disorder. No more of this “you’re just over-sensitive” rubbish.
If a reader remembers only one image from the novel, what should it be?
Oh, there are many. Without spoilers, it’s when Zara is hit with the reality that the immutable laws of physics no longer apply. Imagine how abjectly terrifying that would be!
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Guilt ridden accident survivor Zara Wilander thinks she is taking on the renovation of a crumbling mansion. But instead, the house takes her on—Zara is progressively haunted. Or, is she simply losing her mind?
Flamboyant estate agent Jenner Reid believes this to be the case and encourages her to continue. But Reid has history with this house. When Zara learns his dark secret, and those of the old house, it may be much too late.
Mounting horror and astonishing word craft result in a masterpiece of the macabre, with all the elements of the classic romantic Gothic style. It is, however, refreshingly different. In the best traditions of The Beckoning Fair One and Rebecca, Zara’s Gothic will thrill your mind and chill your blood.
If you dare…
Zara’s Gothic: A Thrilling Journey Into Adventure, Horror, Mystery, and Romance
Zara’s Gothic opens with a woman already half-shattered. Zara Wilander, a paramedic in upstate New York, is wrecked by guilt after a road accident kills a dog and nearly kills a pedestrian; when work, therapy, and ordinary housing all fail her, she ends up living in her handmade van on a secluded property dominated by a derelict Victorian house that seems less abandoned than watchful. From there, the novel widens from trauma narrative into Gothic haunting: a lonely, hyper-attuned protagonist, an eccentric real-estate man named Jenner Reid, and a decaying house whose pull may be supernatural, psychological, or some unnerving braid of both.
I found myself most taken with the book’s atmosphere and with the way it inhabits Zara’s consciousness. McRoberts doesn’t give her a clean, tasteful suffering; she gives her jagged perception, sensory overwhelm, intrusive memory, odd wit, and a genuine estrangement from the social world. That makes the novel feel intimate. The prose often leans baroque, but in this case, the excess is part of the weather system: rot creaks, trees thrum, sound wounds, silence has grain. When the book is working at full voltage, it feels less like reading a plot than like walking through a feverish interior architecture.
What I really liked, though, wasn’t just the haunted-house apparatus but the tenderness threaded through it. Zara’s bond with her van, her craftsmanship, her ache for solitude, and her unstable reliance on Jenner give the novel an emotional undercarriage sturdier than its melodrama. Some scenes sprawl, and some flourishes arrive in clusters. This book has a peculiar pulse. It wants grandeur, morbidity, vulnerability, and sentiment all at once, and more often than not, it earns that ambition.
I’d recommend Zara’s Gothic to readers of Gothic fiction, psychological horror, haunted-house novels, women-centered dark fiction, and literary supernatural suspense, or anyone who likes their genre work emotionally raw rather than mechanically slick. It reminded me, at moments, of Shirley Jackson by way of Mexican Gothic: not because it copies either, but because it understands that a house can become an accomplice to grief. This is a strange, bruised, haunted novel that turns damage into atmosphere and atmosphere into destiny.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0H6JL2WX7
