Horsham debut novel: half Gothic whodunnit and half Victorian ghost story

Annika, aged 37, said: “The Beast of Bridde Place is admittedly a bit of an oddball as debut novels go, sort of half Gothic whodunnit and half Victorian ghost story and hopefully playing about a bit with the expectations of both. “I’m not sure there was what you might call a proper idea there when I began to write it. I started with a single image – the image which ultimately became the last scene in the book – and essentially wrote the book to explain it. I suppose you could say I wrote the whole thing because I wanted to read the story that image was part of, only it didn’t exist yet. So really as you see I had no choice! “To be honest, I didn’t so much plan the book as watch it develop over the course of many many drafts. For most of the time I was writing it, I was working at a high-pressure job in London and commuting daily from Brighton and then Horsham so a lot of the initial drafts were written on the train to and from work or in the odd few hours I could scrounge of a weekend. It was enormously frustrating at the time, but in retrospect I think it helped me sit with the characters and the elements of the story and let them develop organically. “One thing I didn’t expect was how, over time, I came to realise that the overarching theme of the book strongly mirrored what I myself was struggling with at that point in my life, namely finding myself on a path in life almost by default which didn’t suit me at all and was in fact actively detrimental to my mental and physical health. I think that’s something many people will be able to relate to. “Writing The Beast of Bridde Place felt a bit like being a little girl again, loading all of my favourite things – the dark, the spooky, the folkish, the other, Gothic tropes and the subversion of them – onto my little wonky-wheeled wagon and setting off to see the world, with only the barest concept of direction to guide me. It’s been a journey to say the least, with a fair few hair-tearing moments of wondering how on Earth I ever thought I could make this work, but also tremendous fun and ultimately one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. “The book opens with Nora awaking to find her wealthy husband Victor murdered in bed beside her. From there we follow Scotland Yard’s Inspector Ritter as he tries to puzzle out a seemingly impossible crime, and Nora as she tries to adjust to widowhood and begins to wonder about a legend of her own past. “The dedication is ‘for all comers’ because that’s who I wrote it for: anyone who wants to read it. In general I would say it’s aimed at people who enjoy a good story with unexpected characters, and are willing to go along with those characters on a journey which may not end up where the reader or indeed the characters expect it to. “The story stands alone. I’ve written several unpublished trunk novels over the years, but The Beast of Bridde Place is the first book I’ve really wanted to share with the world. “I’ve been creating stories since I can remember, purely for my own entertainment. The first time I tried writing it down I must have been about nine. I can’t remember what inspired me to write that specific story, but I remember getting a notebook and burning with excitement to get it all down. I found the notebook years later and it turns out I only managed five or six pages. "A couple of years later I discovered the magic of Wordpad on the family computer and started dabbling in short stories before realising that my real love is in long-form fiction towards the end of my teens. I think that’s why it’s taken me such a long time to get around to publishing anything – novels are very long things to practise on! “My writing is still primarily for my own entertainment. As much as it sometimes feels like repeatedly running into a brick wall, I couldn’t do it if it were any other way.”