Liam Higginson’s The Hill in the Dark Grove is a gorgeously written folk horror with a compelling atmosphere of mounting dread. At sixty-five years old, Carwyn is facing the knowledge that the farm his family has owned in the mountains of northern Wales will likely end with him. Rhian, his wife and partner since they were teenagers, had the brilliance to go anywhere and do anything with her life, if only she hadn’t fallen in love with Carwyn, his family, and with working the farm. Mountain life is hard but not harsh – at least not harsh in a way anyone with a rural upbringing wouldn’t recognize – but forest figures some might call myths are never far from the dark crags of this landscape. The perils of sheep farming all seem to come to a head at once, making Carwyn and Rhian fear they might be living under a curse.
For as long as Carwyn can remember, his family’s land has coughed up trinkets from eras past, including a figurine with odd energy which makes him not want to keep it in the house. Then the overgrown lower pasture reveals itself, and Carwyn believes he’s found the secret to saving his farm. Rhian wants to support her husband’s new interest in the field he’s avoided his whole life, but when curiosity descends into obsession, she has to decide whether she can trust this new version of the man she loves.
I’ve rarely felt so engulfed by a reading experience. Even as my fear built over what was to follow, I could not stop turning pages to find out what would become of this couple. Liam and I spoke via email about the parallels between Welsh and Native storytelling, the importance of Welsh voices telling Welsh stories, and what it’s like to be an outsider artist. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aaron John Curtis: The narrative includes scenes set in the past and character flashbacks to give us Rhian and Carwyn’s history, as well as the history of the mountain. Did every draft weave like this? Or was it something you arrived at through revision?
Liam Higginson: About ten years ago, before I wrote Dark Grove, I worked on what I guess you might call a practice novel which was written completely out of sequence. Some of the first scenes I wrote for that ended up falling quite late in the story, and I don’t think I wrote the opening chapters until almost last. With Dark Grove, though, the story came out of me pretty much in the order it appears in the book. Not through any kind of intent, but just because that’s how it happened naturally in the writing process.
This helped maintain the sense of flow during the flashbacks because they weren’t scenes written later and then backfilled into the existing narrative. They follow on from each other the way they do because I was discovering the story and the characters in the same order as the reader does.
AJC: Indigenous authors are often put in a box of “magical realism” when we’d simply call our writing realism. Do you consider the stories in your book – such as the Mari Lwyd, the gwyllion, or the afanc – folklore or history?
LH: My wife and I were talking recently about the way beliefs are often hierarchised. How people tend to see cultural and scientific understandings as a linear progression from ignorance to knowledge rather than a difference in interpretation. While I don’t think of, say, the Mari Lwyd as a literal being, I think stories like this can be just as valid in how we view our relationship to the world we inhabit as reading a science textbook. I don’t think one is a substitute for the other (and I’m very much against the current trend of anti-science and anti-intellectual movements) but for me they’re both important components of the same desire to know and understand.
In Wales, a lot of our history – particularly early history – has been filtered down to us by way of oral traditions and narratives. Beyond a certain point, the line between folklore and history essentially becomes meaningless. There’s a collection of oral stories that were recorded in the Middle Ages called the Mabinogion (I guess in many ways similar to the Arthurian legends that your readers will probably be familiar with). These are stories that almost certainly have their roots in real historical events and figures, but shaped by generations of retellings and perceptions to the point that it’s now impossible to untangle what was real from what wasn’t.
Reviews have referred to the vignettes at the start of each chapter as ‘folklore’ or ‘mythology’, when I think of them as scenes from real historical periods referring to real historical events, with only hints of anything that might be considered – for want of a better word – supernatural. Of course, there’s no right and wrong interpretation, but these weren’t intended to be read as folk tales, but as things happening to real people at different moments in history.
AJC: The rural mountain setting plays such a significant part in the novel, and the sometimes grisly details of sheep farming helped set the tone beautifully. Did you need to do any research about farm life?
LH: I don’t come from a farming family, but I grew up in a small village where a lot of my neighbours and classmates farmed. The novel required a great deal of research about farming, but I suppose you could say I was in the perfect place to do it. One way this research really helped was in shaping the structure of the story. The farming calendar is, by necessity, fairly fixed – there’s a kind of routine to it where certain tasks or events are going to be happening each month, and that became the framework that I built the book around. I’m not a big planner, and I largely let the story take me where it wanted to go, so it was helpful to have at least some kind of structure to adhere to.
The story takes place mostly over a single calendar year, and the original working title of the book was The Field Calendar. I was dissuaded from this when my editor pointed out that people searching for the book online would just end up finding calendars. That structure, though, and the idea of the circle of the year, of the seasons, of the life cycle of us as individuals and of humanity more generally, is still at the core of the novel.
AJC: How did your upbringing inform the sense of place?
LH: As a kid, I remember going out to explore the fields and woods around my house, or going hiking in the nearby mountains with my family, or visiting local historic sites. The places in the story are all ones I’ve known intimately my whole life, so in that sense very little invention was needed. It was great to be able to revisit places like Beddgelert and Betws-y-Coed when writing scenes set there to immerse myself in them again and make sure I was getting all the details exactly right.
AJC: While your voice is unique, the story gave me whiffs of Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre and Stephen King’s The Shining. Any books or authors you consider influential in writing your debut?
LH: Thank you, it’s so flattering to be compared to King and Hurley, who I really admire. The Shining (and Pet Sematary, another of my favourite King stories) was definitely a major influence. I think King is often underestimated in terms of the literary quality of his novels – they’re so much more than just horror, and if you were to pick out only the scenes where something actively scary is happening, they’re often mostly slow-burn character pieces where the ‘monster’ is only incidental.
When I was writing Dark Grove, I thought a lot about Ray Bradbury’s 1944 short story, “The Jar.” It’s a story that really scares me, not because anything particularly scary happens, but because of the implications it leaves the reader with. It’s about a farmer who buys a jar containing something vague and amorphous from a circus sideshow, and he and his neighbours become fixated on it, each interpreting its floating contents as something completely different, shaped by their own desires and fears. I wanted the mound in the novel to have this same effect, a thing that engenders obsession but that no two people experience in the same way.
I’m always glad for an opportunity to talk about another hugely influential novel: Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. On the face of it, it might seem like a stretch to say that a story about a Laguna Pueblo war veteran in New Mexico was part of the inspiration for a book about sheep farmers in north Wales, but I see a lot of parallels and commonalities. I’m absolutely not saying the struggles of Welsh people today are anywhere near to being on the same level as those of the Indigenous peoples in North America, but the way that Tayo deals with the connected traumas of the war (on a micro level), and colonialism and empire (on a macro level) really spoke to me, and Silko’s questions of identity and tradition in a changing modern world definitely informed many of the themes in Dark Grove.
AJC: This is a debut that, besides the gorgeous prose and deep character studies of Rhian and Carwyn, reads like a master at work. From one guy with no literary degree or MFA to another, how did you get your plot so tight?
LH: That’s so kind, I really appreciate it. It’s great to talk about this with another author with no literary degree or MFA (the other day, I had to google to double check what an MFA even was). I think in many ways the tightness of the plot just comes from how small the cast of the novel is. It’s not a sprawling epic or an intricate fantasy with worldbuilding and magic systems – things I would probably struggle to keep straight. It’s just a simple story about two ordinary people, written by a simple, ordinary guy.
My wife was a huge help with this as well. She has a literature degree, and she’s always a voice of reason in my writing process, keeping me on track and pointing out whenever I say something irrelevant or out of character.
AJC: Does being an outsider artist help or hurt you as an author?
LH: Being an outsider artist has been both a blessing and a curse. Without the well-trodden path (at least in the UK) of private school to top university to publishing, it’s so difficult to get anyone to read your writing. It was only by sheer luck – and a lot of rejections and unanswered queries – that the manuscript eventually got pulled out of an agent’s slush pile. Even now, I still mostly feel like an impostor, like all this is happening by accident. I remember speaking at my publisher’s New Voices event for their upcoming debut authors last November, where I was in a lineup alongside a top neurosurgeon, an award-winning poet, an art historian and museum curator, and a nature writer who had lived with wolves in the Arctic. And then there was me, who works at the arcade on Llandudno Pier.
But being an outsider helps too. I don’t have the baggage that comes with a formal education in writing. I don’t know what rules I’m supposed to be following or when I’m doing it the ‘wrong’ way. I don’t know the first thing about marketing or what sells. I’ve always written – including this novel – mainly as a hobby rather than with a view to making a career of it, so I just write the stories I want to tell and to read, which is freeing.
AJC: You mentioned the small cast. There are side characters in the book but it’s basically a two-hander. Was making the couple senior citizens a conscious choice?
LH: Yes, it was absolutely a conscious choice to make the couple senior citizens. In your classic folk horror story (think of greats like The Wicker Man, Midsommar, or even The VVitch) the protagonist is usually someone from the city, someone coded as ‘modern’ who finds themselves a fish out of water in the scary, ‘backwards’ countryside. The threat in these stories almost always comes from the locals, and from the creepy old traditions they follow. I wanted Dark Grove to be an inversion of this, where the protagonists are the country people living by what some might call the ‘old ways’, and the threat to them comes from the encroachment of modernity.
There’s a really harmful trope in horror, too, where old women are presented as a source of fear and disgust. I don’t know if it comes from our fear of ageing in this society where youth and beauty are put on a pedestal, but it’s surprisingly prevalent. The older women in my life have always been figures I’ve admired and looked up to, so I hope I’ve been able to do Rhian justice in how she’s portrayed in the story.
AJC: Growing up, did you have an elder who told you stories?
LH: I was really blessed with elders who told me stories when I was growing up. There are more than I can name here without leaving out important people, but just as an example, when I was very young I didn’t go to what I guess you would call kindergarten. While my parents were at work, I would spend almost every day at my grampa’s house listening to his stories. My parents are both great storytellers too.
AJC: As an author I hate being asked question in interviews but then I find myself thinking of an answer I wish I’d given later, so I’m going to ask it anyway and give you a chance to go off; What question do you wish I’d asked?
LH: This is a great question, but I also hate it!
Without giving any spoilers, some people read the ending as completely bleak or hopeless. I don’t see it that way at all. I feel like it’s a fairly hopeful, optimistic ending for a horror story.
I love stories that trust the reader. They’re the ones that keep me up at night, the ones I discuss and debate with my friends and family or argue about with strangers online. Dark Grove is ultimately about coming to terms with our fear of death, whether that’s our own individual death or the death of a people and their way of life. We don’t get to know what’s on the other side. We don’t get to accompany our loved ones when they go there. We have to sit with that uncertainty and learn to come to terms with it or else go mad.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Liam Higginson was born and raised in the deepest hinterlands of rural North Wales. In what some might generously call a varied career, he has been an extremely bored accountant, helped out at a B&B in a French watermill, run errands for the CEO of a large consultancy firm, spent lockdown in an empty holiday cottage while a herd of goats took over the town, and now works with his wife at Llandudno Pier.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Aaron has judged for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance prizes, the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Since 2004, Aaron has been Quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. He lives in Miami, and his debut novel, Old School Indian, was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award.