Year’s Best 2012: Elizabeth Hand on “Near Zennor”

What can you tell me about the origins of Near Zennor?

I actually had the title in mind long before I had any idea as to what the story would be about. Since the late 1990s I’ve visited West Penwith a number of times and was always so struck by the landscape, which I found (find) beautiful yet also somewhat sinister. As my original author’s notes states, the inexplicable events that Evelyn experiences as a girl in fact happened to myself and two friends when we were 13. To this day, I have no explanation for them; I only know they actually occurred. For decades I’ve had that in the back of my mind as something to use in a story, and it finally all came together in “Near Zennor.”

I started this story in London, and was headed to West Penwith to continue working on it. Right before I left, I learned that one of my oldest and closest friends back in the US had suffered a cerebral aneurysm. He was in a coma and died the day I returned home. So that sense of dread and grief colored the few days that I was in Penwith, and fed into the story when I finally returned home and finished writing it.

Dread is the theme that pops to mind most readily while reading this: it’s almost more terrifying than an actual horror. How important is the buildup in a story?

I’ve long wanted write a Robert Aickman-style story — his work is so brilliant and utterly sui generis, and no matter how often i read his work, I can never figure out how he does it. It’s like trying to figure out how a master magician performs a seemingly impossible sleight-of-hand. I think that genuine dread is a more difficult emotion to evoke and sustain than horror, so I set myself the challenge of trying to write something that relied on a burgeoning sense of unease, culminating in the horror vacuii that Jeffrey experiences at the end. It’s a long slow build, and mostly I just drew on my own recent memory of wandering the moors on the cliffs surrounding Treen, looking for ancient barrows and standing stones with the wind tearing up off the ocean, and grieving for my friend.

There’s a heavy influence of English folklore and mythology in the locations that you’ve picked: what drew you towards these?

I’ve always loved British folklore. Oddly, I hadn’t realized there was a  Time in Faerie story set near Zennor till after I had plotted out the story. The innkeeper at the place where we stayed in Penwith told me about a local ruin known as “Cherry’s House.” I went looking for it (I didn’t find it), and later she showed me a book containing a version of “Cherry of Zennor.” It was creepily similar to the story I was writing. Very strange.

I have a hard time thinking of my story now, because so many of the circumstances that fed into it were so disturbing.