Trying to Live With Ghosts
JAW McCarthy on her Silk & Sinew story "Guilt is a Little House"
by JAW McCarthy
(TW- stillbirth)
What inspired you to write your story found in Silk & Sinew? What do you hope readers take away from reading it?
I’ve always loved the popular Thai folktale of Mae Nak (Mother Nak). Many people view her story as a romantic tragedy about a woman’s undying love for her husband and how the community’s fear of ghosts came between them (there are shrines dedicated to her all over Thailand). Her story has been told many times, but what inspired me to write “Guilt is a Little House” is an aspect that I haven’t seen addressed: her stillborn child.
Nak died in childbirth while her husband Mak was away serving in a war. News of her death never reached him, and when he returned he found his wife and newborn child waiting for him at home. They enjoyed their reunion and lived happily together. Until the neighbors told him that he was living with ghosts.
Mak didn’t believe them at first. Then one day he saw Nak reach for a lime with a supernaturally long arm. Once Mak understood that his wife and child were dead, he fled the house and took refuge in a temple where ghosts cannot enter. A grieving Nak went on to terrorize the village. Depending on the telling, her story ends in banishment, entrapment, or a promise of being reunited with her family in the next life if she moves on.
It’s a heartbreaking story, and an argument for at least trying to live with ghosts. I always wondered about their child, though, how that little ghost fared once her mother, Nak, was banished. In “Guilt is a Little House”, I reimagined the story of Mae Nak from the child’s point of view, now a teenager trapped in a spirit house with her always sleeping, always angry mother. Valley lives a restricted and isolated life watching her best friend, the landlord’s daughter, do all the things she should but can’t. But what happens when the landlord’s daughter moves across the country for college?
Now without her one window into the outside world, Valley’s existence will shrink even smaller, her cage even more confining. What must she do to escape this limbo where she is always hungry and never satisfied?
I think many readers will recognize Valley’s hunger, her lack of fulfillment, her frustration and pain at being trapped in a situation that is out of her control. Devotion, grief, and fear play equal parts in the story of Mae Nak and I hope I reflected that in “Guilt is a Little House”. In the end, all Nak wanted was to remain with her loving family, but instead she was deemed a monster and banished. Fictionalizing the child, Valley, allowed me to show a different side of that grief and the possibility of freedom for two women who are demonized by a society that doesn’t understand them.
For more of JAW’s work:
Novella:
For the past six years, Ronnie has worked selling merch for a perpetually touring band. Late nights, sweaty clubs, dingy motel rooms, endless roads—as rough as it’s been, there is no other way of life for this band of hungry succubi leaving bodies in their wake.
Until she meets the enigmatic Helene.
Helene is just as restless, just as lonely, and just as full of secrets. With Helene in tow, Ronnie and the band make their way across the Pacific Northwest, trying to outrun not only their mistakes, but the mysterious disease stalking the band, a disease that devours succubi from the inside out.
The hunger is as endless as the road, but maybe Ronnie doesn’t always want to sleep alone.
Story Collection:
Sometimes We’re Cruel and Other Stories
Website:
About:
J.A.W. McCarthy is the two-time Bram Stoker Award and two-time Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of Sometimes We’re Cruel and Other Stories (Cemetery Gates Media, 2021) and Sleep Alone (Off Limits Press, 2023). Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Vastarien, PseudoPod, LampLight, Apparition Lit, Tales to Terrify, and The Best Horror of the Year Vol 13 (ed. Ellen Datlow). She is a second generation immigrant of Thai and Slovak descent and lives with her spouse and assistant cats in the Pacific Northwest. You can call her Jen on most platforms @JAWMcCarthy. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and is represented by Lane Heymont of The Tobias Literary Agency.
Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora:
"Guilt is a Little House" was a haunting and wonderful story in the collection. Really cool to hear more about its origin.