Kate Hamer Meet the Author

Who doesn't enjoy a story that delves

into the supernatural?

It touches some of our deepest feelings and fears.

Kate Hamer's new novel, The Doll Funeral,

unfolds in a dark and mysterious place where a young girl,

Ruby, finds some escapee from a nightmare childhood at home

and a strange kind of solace in the presence of ghosts.

A story where the two strands in an adopted child's life are wound

together in the world.

Where we cannot be sure what is real and what is imagined.

Welcome.

I read somewhere, Kate, that you were moved and I think

horrified as a child by Grimms' fairy tales, and having read

The Doll Funeral I'm not really surprised!

Because there is so much of that spirit in here.

Definitely.

I had a very old edition of Grimms fairy tales as well,

I think it was from around the turn of the 19th, 20th century,

so they definitely were not sugar-coated in that version.

In some ways, I feel the original fairy stories are crime

stories, to a great extent.

And so I was steeped in that from quite an early age.

They are horror stories in a way, they are about lost children,

about children being eaten, but fierce wolves coming out of

the forest and witches, and so on.

But our imaginations are stirred by these things, aren't they.

Yes, I think definitely because they speak to fundamental

truths and fundamental fears within ourselves.

So yeah, that's definitely something I have never shaken off, definitely.

Particularly in this book.

It begins with the revelation to a young girl, she is 13, Ruby,

that she was adopted.

She is not a natural child of the parents she lives with.

And to that extent she is confronted by the beginning which is

what we are talking about.

Yeah, definitely.

Ruby finds out on her 13th birthday that she is adopted.

And her reaction to this is that she runs out...

She's delighted!

She's delighted and sings for joy, she just looks at the sky

and start singing the joy.

But there is a reason for this because her life has been such

a brutish one up until that point.

That was a very strong central image, a starting image

for the book, I think.

Of a girl just bursting out of the back door

almost like a camera was Following behind her.

It was kind of a jumping off point for the whole book.

And what she then dares is to immerse herself, in a way,

in an alternative world, where she is in the darkness

of the Forest of Dean, dark in every sense,

physically dark, a place you can get lost in,

but also dark because there is evidence of the supernatural,

there are strange people living different lives.

It is in that sense a journey into the unknown.

Yeah, very much so.

And I think fairy tales again come in here,

because a lot of them, I mean, the forest is

so important in fairy tales.

It is about maybe straying off the path and goodness knows

what is going to happen if you do, it could be dangerous but it's often

people looking for alternatives as well to the well trodden path,

I think.

And that is definitely what Ruby does in the forest.

Above all, it is a dark place.

And there is a very, very strong supernatural element

in this story which I will not go into details because it

will spoil it for the reader.

But she finds for herself that the division between the real

world and the past world and the world of her imagination

is a division that she can easily get rid of, quite easily.

Yes, she slips between them quite comfortably.

And I think it's a lot to do with the book,

is about how the past kind of enacts its presence

on the present.

And it is kind of, can you break away from that?

Is the past resonating on the present, Ruby

is trying to escape that.

She goes through trials, trials of fire and ice,

and all sorts of things, and it's the question,

can we escape our past, can we make a new feature

with different people.

And a different outcome, can we find that alternative path in the forest?

Because as this story unfolds she is at a very important point

in her life physically and mentally, she is 13, she is going

into adolescence, all sorts of things are happening to her,

physical and mental.

And it is a story that in our own way, we all know.

I think it is just an interesting age where you are on the threshold

and the cusp of so many things, it is an age where, I think,

things happen for you.

And also can go badly wrong, quite easily.

The Girl In The Red Coat was a book that made a huge reputation

feel and like the book, this book is written in a way that

grabs you from the first page.

Are you one of those writers who thinks that really

in the end, everything is in the first 4-5 paragraphs?

Oh, that is really interesting.

I will tell you the way I write, I tend to write the beginning,

maybe the first two chapters, something like that,

and then very quickly move on write to the last paragraph,

definitely the last line, which doesn't seem to change.

Which suggests that they are related!

Yes!

That is very interesting because there are people who just

head off into the wide blue yonder and say where will this idea

take me, you are not one of them?

I think, from point A to B, there can be various ways.

Things can happen there.

Did the supernatural element grow in your hands,

once you got your teeth into the story?

I think it did.

There is a little character called Shadow in it.

Quite a tricksy dark little character.

He is an imp.

His presence was much lighter in the first draft, I found,

and this is what I find more than anything, it's the characters

that kind of tag on your sleeve.

And he was definitely one of those.

Do you find yourself susceptible to the idea of occurrences

that are inexplicable?

I have never actually experienced it but I know people

who I sort of trust, rational, sane people,

who believe that they have.

I just think it's fascinating.

I believe the really supernatural thing is the mind, fundamentally.

And actually the mind, it can do anything.

And it plays tricks we can't understand.

Exactly.

But in the end, to go back to where we began,

it takes us into the world of the fairy tale because that kind

of story, the Gothic gloom and excitement of some of those

old fairy tales, passed down the generations,

turn up in all sorts of cultures in different forms,

never fades, does it?

No, I think there is something about these folktales,

these old stories that just goes very, very deep.

And I bet you that if you picked up that battered old copy

of your Grimms fairy tales you would know before you turn

to each page what the picture was going to be on the next page!

That's so true.

Because I have still got it and those illustrations

are so familiar, absolutely.

I know exactly what you mean.

Kate Hamer, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much.