C.J. Tudor’s new winning combo: an unassuming detective, a vampire colony, and a remote Alaskan town

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Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole, and I'm happy to welcome bestselling thriller author, C.J. Tudor. Author of bestselling horror thriller The Chalk Man, which was her 2018 debut. C.J. Tudor is here to discuss her new listen, The Gathering. Welcome, C.J.

C.J. Tudor: Hello. Thank you for having me.

NR: It's nice to have you. So, The Gathering takes place in the fictional town of Deadhart, Alaska, where Detective Barbara Atkins is set to investigate the death of 15-year-old Marcus Anderson. However, because of the town's mounting fears of being hunted by the vampire colony they share the area with, Detective Atkins is put under more and more pressure to make it an open-and-shut case so that the town can get their justice. How did you come up with the premise of The Gathering?

CT: I'd always wanted to write a vampire novel. I love vampires. They're just one of those long-lasting kind of monsters, and there's just so much you can do with them. One of my favorite films is The Lost Boys, and I love things like Let the Right One In, 30 Days of Night. I'd always wanted to do it, but the thing is, they have been, pun intended, done to death. There's been so many vampire books and films and stories, and I thought, "If I do it, I'd really want to bring a new angle to it."

And I wanted to write it as part of a crime novel as well. I basically had been thinking about it for ages, and then I sort of had the idea, “What if the vampires were the ones who were persecuted, to an extent?” They've lived alongside humans for centuries and mostly exist on animal blood, but due to fear and superstition, they've kind of been killed and hunted almost into extinction, which is where we are in this world in The Gathering. And because of that, their species is now protected because there's so few of them left, and they live in remote colonies in very isolated parts of the world, like Alaska, for example. And I liked this idea, and that became the setting-off point for the book, essentially. These vampire colonies are protected, but they can be, in extreme circumstances, for example, if the vampires are deemed to have gone rogue and pose a threat to human life, they can be culled, because in this world they're kind of almost treated a little bit like animals to an extent.

And so into this backdrop comes Detective Barbara Atkins. And she has this responsibility on her shoulders, because if it is deemed that a vampire's killed this young boy in this remote town, then she has got the power to say, "Well, this colony is a threat to human life, and we have to get rid of this colony." And, of course, it's not all as straightforward as that. There's a lot of dark secrets in this little town, there's a lot of dark history going back centuries, and it was a lot of fun to play with that.

"One thing I think you always try to do as a thriller writer is you like to isolate your characters and cut them off from help."

I started off with this idea of, basically, these vampire skulls on the wall, almost like hunting trophies that people kept, and instead of hunting trophies in these small towns, people kept vampire teeth and skulls, and they kept old stakes. And the idea of keeping these trophies, this memorabilia, almost like perhaps you'd keep hunting trophies and things, really spoke to me. It was such a great visual.

And the vampires in the book aren't really supernatural. They are mortal, but they live for a very, very long time, hundreds of years as opposed to sort of our decades. They can't turn into bats or smoke, you can see them in mirrors. A cross ain't gonna do you a lot of good. But they are sort of susceptible to daylight. That is their weakness, as it were. I just love kind of reinventing the whole genre. Once I had the idea, "This is the angle we're gonna go for," there was just so much to do with it from that point on.

NR: That actually was one of my favorite parts of the novel, is the fact that you did make your vampires a bit different from what I would say would be the classic trope of vampires. So, for listeners who may not know, how would you say your vampires differ from those classical takes of vampires?

CT: Well, the big thing was I didn't want twinkly vampires. There were to be no twinkly vampires. They needed to be quite raw and feral and brutal, and they are, basically. Then they've been driven to the outskirts of society, essentially. So, the vampires in my novel, the colony near the town of Deadhart, they live in an old, abandoned copper mine in the mountains, and they have to kind of scrape by an existence, because vampires are not permitted to work or mix with humans in this society. They're very much segregated and treated as other.

They don't kind of want to be associated with humans. They have their own way of living. I'd also describe them as, you know, they have to live like almost travelers, or people perhaps who have created their own sort of lifestyle in society without the modern trappings that perhaps the humans take for granted. So, they wear animal skins, they exist on animal blood, and they have their own traditions and superstitions and history and rules that they live by. And I wanted them to kind of be dirty and a bit brutal and feral almost. And their leader, she's a centuries-old vampire but in the body of a young girl, called Athelinda, and she was a lot of fun to write as well.

NR: I loved her character. It broke my heart to hear what she went through. I was just like, "oh."

CT: She’s like kind of a brutal, quite scary character. But when you get her backstory, you feel for her, for what she's sort of had to go through as well. She was a lot of fun to write. I mean, a character like that is such a joy to write, there's so much you can do.

NR: Did you find yourself putting any of yourself into Athelinda?

CT: Actually, I kind of had her visually in mind. My little girl, Betty, she's 10. She's quite fierce. So, there may be little bits of Betty in there. Betty was fascinated by this role because I told her about it, and she's a little bit of an actress at heart. Because the book's been optioned, she's like, "Oh, Mummy, could I play the role of Athelinda?" She's even practicing her US accent so she could play this vampire. She's actually pretty good. I've got to say, she was pretty scary.

So, there's always bits and pieces of lots of people I think you put into characters. I think there's probably quite a lot of me in Barbara, the detective. You know, the kind of 51-year-old, overweight, not sort of quite so fit and glamorous detective. I think there's probably quite a lot of me in Barbara. [laughs]

NR: We're actually going to get back to that, but one of the things that I wanted to ask about Athelinda's character is that, in your story, talking about something that you did different in regards to your vampires, why did you decide to give your vampires the ability to have children?

CT: I thought it was really important that, because we have this kind of idea that vampires exist just by their longevity, by feeding off humans, and that child vampires are vampires that have been kind of “turned,” as we call it in the book. I think turned is a usual, quite normal phrase for vampires. "Turning" humans into other vampires. But I felt that it was important that they were able to sort of be families, as we would be. So, they have family units and they have children, and, actually, in their rules, the idea of turning a child, a human child, into a vampire has been very much forbidden for decades because of the damage it does. It's not seen as moral. It’s not a right thing to do, and so they don't need to prey upon humans, because they can have families and have their own society, as it were.

And I thought that was an important thing, but, of course, then you have to write it kind of more of your own law, the idea that the aging process doesn't slow for them until they reach maturity and the incisors don't come through more until they reach maturity. So again, it was like creating this whole different kind of myth about these particular vampires. And it was fun to do because I love world-building, and my mind was always thinking, "So how can we make this different? How can we make this vampire society feel real?" Because I wanted it to feel real and plausible in this world, and so all the things about how long they live had to feel grounded, that they're not supernatural in this world. They exist. They're not like some supernatural myth, and I thought that was really important.

NR: Yeah, they predated the society in Deadhart.

CT: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. They were probably there first, and it's a really sort of interesting thing to look at when you start to come from that perspective.

NR: So as a UK author, what type of research did you do on towns in Alaska while you were writing this story, and what inspired you to set the town in such an isolated environment?

CT: Well, I love the idea of Alaska for a setting for vampires. Something about it works so well. You've got the cold, the isolation, the darkness. You know, 30 Days of Night played with that really well, and I thought that was just a perfect sort of setting for my vampires. And, of course, this town of Deadhart is very isolated. One thing I think you always try to do as a thriller writer is you like to isolate your characters and cut them off from help. And so the idea of this very isolated town, and there's a snowstorm that means they can't have any help come in, and it's just the vampire colony and the humans in this town, made that work really well as well.

But, yeah, I did think long and hard about setting. I think, as a writer, if you set a book somewhere that you're not familiar with or you don't come from, you have to really do your research. It's really important. So I did a lot of online research to start with to get the first draft of the book done, and then last year me and my husband traveled to Alaska, in spring last year, and we stayed in Talkeetna, which a lot of the book is sort of based on Talkeetna. But I also mixed it with another really isolated town, an old mine town called Kennicott McCarthy, where there's a very big, old, abandoned copper mine. That was just too far for us to get to in the time that we had to visit, but in my head, it's a mix-up of that, really.

"It's easy to be liberal when the wolf isn't at your own door."

But it was great because it enabled us to go and get our feet on the ground and wander around and talk to people and take photos, and just kind of soak it up a bit. We only had like a week to go and visit, but it really did help, because although you can research online, it doesn't beat actually visiting somewhere. And what was great was all the stuff I had in my head was kind of reinforced by my visit. It was even quirkier and stranger, because Alaska is kind of quirky and weird. There's a kind of like craziness about it, I think, because of where it is, and the people are lovely in a kind of weird, crazy way.

It's wonderful. I loved it, and I was able to take photos of all the houses, and even down to silly little things, like the food and everything else. I'd never heard of reindeer sausage before I visited Alaska. It's everywhere. And it was just little details and being able to take all those photos and come back and look at them and put them into the book and really visualize this town. It was so, so helpful, and, obviously, it's a fictional town and things have changed and you have to stretch and be a little bit loose with the truth sometimes in fiction, but I think it really gave me that grounding. I knew this town when I was writing the book then. It just added that color, I think, and authenticity, hopefully.

NR: I really enjoyed the town of Deadhart. I think it actually really did fit. I think a lot of people who have seen a small town in America, you could see a lot of the tensions and the conversations, the crowd mixing. Yeah, it all gelled together really well.

CT: Good. And it was a lot of fun to visit. Like even when we visited, we went to a lot of the bars and stuff there. They even had, to my huge delight, loads of animal skins and animal heads and stuff all around the bars, which was great, because, obviously, in my book, I kind of swap that for vampire skulls and stakes and things. But they looked like I wanted them to look, which was brilliant. I was like, "This town's even weirder than I wanted it to be, so this is perfect."

NR: I think you definitely had the same experience as Barbara. Barbara was like, "Oh, my goodness. This was like home, but, oh, gosh, home again." Speaking of Barbara, Detective Barbara Atkins is quite a serious character, and I found myself appreciating how rational and calm she is, even as she's being pressured not to be by the angry folks of Deadhart. What were key characteristics about Barbara that you felt were integral to her abilities to solve this specific case?

CT: I like that fact that, I mean, obviously, she has history. We go through Barbara's backstory and she has history with vampire colonies, and she has her own kind of secrets and stuff that happened to her growing up as a child. I wanted her to come across as like a really down-to-earth sort of woman that people underestimate. That you perhaps look over. She’s not gorgeous. She's quite plain and dumpy, and she's in her 50s, and she's easy to underestimate. But she's actually really sharp and she's really good at reading people, but she plays on that kind of easy-going, "Yeah, I might be a detective, I'm just this harmless little woman coming here to ask a few questions," and I really liked that about her. But when pushed, she can be stubborn and she's got that grit inside her.

Yeah, she was great. I love Barbara. I was able to just put silly things in there, like Barbara's the sort of woman who will start chasing after a suspect and kind of bemoan the fact that she really needs a sports bra for this kind of thing. Yeah, she was a lot of fun to write, because I didn't want her to be, as I say, that cool, good-looking kind of character. I wanted her to be the opposite of that, really, entirely.

NR: I really enjoyed some of Barbara's quips in the back of her head. It's a really good touch to the story from her POV. You said that you related a lot to Barbara. Where do you find yourself most reflected in Barbara?

CT: So, I think with Barbara, obviously, we're sort of a similar age. She's 51, I'm 52 now, and I kind of identified with her as an older woman. Quite often, I think you're overlooked a little bit as you get older, in society, and the fact that she's not this kind of glamorous supermodel trotting around. She's much more kind of down-to-earth. And she's a little sarcastic and a little dry, and I think I sort of put bits of myself in that, really, which is quite fun to do.

And Barbara, I suppose, is quite a liberal character. She's quite, I think, accepting of people, is the way to look at it. She sympathizes with the vampires. I wouldn't say she's on their side, but she has sympathy for them. And I suppose I regard myself as a fairly sort of liberal type of person who tries to see both sides in things. It was interesting, within the book, using vampires as a way to sort of talk about divisions in society in a way, and how we sort of will regard each other, and to talk about people's prejudices, because we use the vampires as a way of sort of examining how prejudiced some people can be in the same way that people can be prejudiced with race and sexuality and sex and so on and so forth. But she's perhaps more on the liberal side, and she kind of bangs up against these townsfolk who are very anti-vampire and very set in their ways. It's interesting to see how she copes with that.

So, I guess there's bits and pieces of me in Barbara. There's bits and pieces of, I think when you write, bits and pieces of you in every character. But I suppose, specifically, I do like writing an older woman as a character just because it's nice to have that as your lead character. Quite often, I remember reading books, particular as I got into my 40s and then my 50s, where it seemed like characters in books were always perpetually stuck at about 35. And that seems to be the cut-off point we have for being interesting and useful characters, because they kind of gotta be attractive and not too old, whereas it's nice to have, for me, to have Barbara kind of the heroine of the story, being in her 50s and a little bit different, really, I guess.

NR: Yeah. I actually always make that joke. After 35 in a lot of shows, you'll see that that's when time slows down. It's an interesting relationship people have with age, and then also vampires are a good vehicle to be a metaphor for a lot of societal issues.

CT: Yeah. They are a metaphor. Yes.

NR: So, you touched on it a bit, but did you find yourself pulling inspiration from a lot of real-world issues when thinking about the conflicts of the vampires?

CT: Yeah, it wasn't really the intention at the start of the book, but the more I wrote it the more you kind of go, "Oh, my goodness, there are lots of parallels here." Like you say, we can use the vampires as a metaphor for a lot of things that are going on in society, and so I did find myself drawing on that. In the book we have the far religious right, who basically want all vampires and colonies to be exterminated because, from their viewpoint, they are the spawns of Satan and they're against God, and they shouldn't be walking the earth. And then you obviously have the liberals who, you know, “No, they must be protected. We've got to protect them. They're just a different species. We've got to learn to live together.”

"I'm always after that genuine 'Ooh, ah' kind of moment in a book."

And so you've got those sides banging up against each other, but you know, you've got to let people think. The idea is to let people make their own minds up. I don't ever like going in with a big kind of hammer, "This is how you should think about this, and these people are right and these people are wrong." Because I wanted to show how it was for the people living in Deadhart as well, because to them, with the colony there, they're living in fear. One of the characters says to her, "It's like living with a shadow, and now a child is dead, and how many more dead children do you want there to be to do something about it?”

You know, it's easy to be liberal when the wolf isn't at your own door. So, I wanted that balance, really. You could see both sides. You could see why the people in the town thought it was their right to be able to go and hunt the vampires, to be able to deal with it themselves, because they have to live with this fear, and maybe the fear is unfounded or maybe it isn't, because now a boy has been killed. I liked to kind of keep trying to show both sides of that in the book. That's a great thing about genre sometimes, you can kind of tackle issues, societal issues, but you can still keep it in the frame of “this is a vampire book and it's a murder mystery,” but we can kind of sneak that in there without you realizing, really.

NR: Yeah, it really does touch on how much fervor is too much fervor, but then at the same time how lenient can you be when it's disregarding the safety of everyone there?

CT: I think she's caught right in the middle of all this. She wants to do right by everybody, but at the same point, she's very much like, "There's something going on here. I know this isn't what it seems and I'm not going to take this position lightly, because there's more stuff at play here." So, she's kind of very focused on that. At the end of the day, it's like, "There's something going on. The evidence isn't stacking up here, people aren't telling me the truth, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this, whatever it takes."

NR: Yeah. She never allows herself to get swept up in any of the crazy things. This story features quite a few shocking twists as the mystery surrounding Marcus and his friends and also the secret past of the town unfolds. When you planned out this story for the first time, how did you approach writing the revelations leading up to the ending?

CT: I'm not a plotter. I'm what they always say is a “pantser.” So, you're either a plotter or a pantser, so it's the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants rule. That I kind of start writing and see where it ends up, which is great, because the story kind of develops very organically and you find all these interesting routes to go down and tangents that I wouldn't have thought of if I sat there and tried to plan it out. It just develops really naturally.

And then quite often, I don't know where the twists and turns will go. The ideas will come along to me as I write, and I'll go, "That would be a cool thing to do. I'll do that," and then I have to rewrite pages before because I've really messed up something earlier on if I do that. But it keeps it interesting, and I always think if it keeps it interesting for me, then hopefully, if you're reading it, you won't know where it's going either, because I don't know where it's going. So, that should, hopefully, keep everyone on their toes.

And then quite often in books, I have an idea of the ending, but I don't know exactly if that's going to be the ending, because I might have a better idea partway through. So I have a loose ending in place, and then I'll often go through lots of twists and turns and random deviations off the plot to get there. With The Gathering, I had a few ideas in mind for parts of the plot. Probably until about three-quarters of the way through, I hadn't settled on exactly how it was going to end. I had a few different ways that it could go, and then I settled on the ending and I nailed that all down. But, yeah, I keep it quite loose all the way through.

The book I'm writing at the moment, I know roughly, I think, how it's going to end, but I could change what one character is or what someone does. It is still loose, and I keep it that way sometimes three-quarters of the way through, just in case I change my mind and decide to do something a bit crazy with it. So, I like that freedom. I don't like to have a plot really nailed down. I find it really, really restricting.

NR: Did you change any characters along the way from what you originally intended for them?

CT: I didn't change the characters. I did, at one point, have in mind that one of the characters in the book, who we sort of only know by interludes with the main plot, might be a different character at the reveal, and that one of the other characters—and I'm not going to say anything if you haven't read the book because it would give too much away—one of the other characters in the book might actually turn out to be a villain who doesn't turn out to be a villain, actually, after all, because I decided it would be too complicated.

I'm always trying to think of ways to trip people up. I'm always trying to think, "Is this too obvious? Will someone guess this? Could I make this more complicated and therefore even harder for myself by doing this?" Just to kind of hide all of the twists and turns and reveals. I'm always after that genuine "Ooh, ah" kind of moment in a book. You know, you get your, "Ah, God, I didn't see that" or "I should've seen that and I didn't see that." I guess that's what you're always going for.

NR: Yeah, I definitely felt that exact reaction a couple of times, especially towards the ending. I was like, "Okay, wait a minute. Do I need to go back?" So, The Gathering is narrated by Lorelei King, an award-winning audiobook narrator. What was your reaction to her performance?

CT: Oh, she's brilliant. I mean, I've met her before and I've heard her before on other projects, and when her name came up for the book, I was just like, "No, no, I know she's going to sound amazing. She will sound amazing as Barbara." So, I just knew she'd do a brilliant job because she's just so good. She was perfect, absolutely perfect for the role of Barbara. Getting the right narrator is so, so important, because they really bring that book to life. And I'm always in awe of how they do it, because I've had to just read a few short things before, and it's tiring. Let alone just reading and making sure you're reading the right words, to actually act that kind of role as well and sit there and do that in the studio for hours on end. It's so hard. I'm in awe of how they do it. But getting that right voice is just key. It's just absolutely key to making that book come to life.

NR: So, what's one thing that you would like listeners to take away from The Gathering after listening?

CT: Oh, well, I always just hope that most people, if they listen or read to any of my books, just come away feeling satisfied, hopefully. There is a little bit of a cheeky thing at the end that I hope people will like as well. Again, without giving anything away, but I hope, generally, that people go away from my book satisfied and feel like they've had a good experience, where they've enjoyed the ride, you know? There's nothing worse than getting to the end of the book and feeling a little bit disappointed that perhaps the revelations weren't quite there or the ending didn't quite stick. It's always getting the ending to stick, is always kind of key, as far as possible. I always want a reader to feel they've had a good ride and they come away feeling satisfied having read the book, and maybe there's things to think about.

You know, sometimes I love a book where you read it or you listen to it and you go, "Oh, gosh, I could do with listening to that again, because I think there might've been things I missed." And I think that's good with a book as well, where you go, "Ah, God, that was in there, but I must've missed it." Someone gets that feeling that there's been a bit of sleight of hand. I quite like that as well. But hopefully feeling satisfied and having enjoyed the experience.

NR: Well, one question as a person who's finished listening is, can we expect a sequel? Since you've done so well at world-building?

CT: I would love to write a sequel. I've got loads of ideas for a second book, if I was allowed to write it. I don't know quite how that's going to go yet. It's interesting, because it's been optioned. And I've had this conversation about it as well. I'm writing a book now and I have an idea lined up for the next book after that, but if it was wanted and people wanted a sequel, I'd happily write that next instead. I'd love to get a chance to do one at some point within a decent time frame, because I have got a plot all laid out for another installment of it, which would be a lot of fun to write, but it's where that lies in the writing schedule, essentially.

NR: Well, I'm saying it now, we need another Barbara Atkins story. Since releasing your first book back in 2018, would you say that you've had a favorite story that you've written since, or one that you've had the most fun writing?

CT: Oh, it is so difficult, isn't it? Because I nearly always say the last book is the one that you tend to have enjoyed the most, in a way, and yet sometimes when you're writing it, you kind of go, "Oh, God, this is so hard, it's difficult, and this book is the hardest I've ever written." Actually, I think what I've really enjoyed is that each book has been different, so each book you like and you enjoy in different ways.

What I've really liked about the last two I've written, The Gathering and The Drift, is that my lovely editors gave me the chance to kind of strike out and do something different with both of them, just kind of move away a little bit from the books I've written before. And I think that's really important to me, because I love being able to do something different each time. So, I loved writing The Drift because it was kind of like apocalyptic and you didn't know what was going on and it was a locked room, you know, lots of different things. More horror than I'd done before. And I love The Gathering because I get a chance to write about vampires, so it's definitely my favorite at the moment.

NR: Oh, I went through a vampire craze. Any vampire media, I consumed it. Any literature, I read it. I listened multiple times. So what subgenre of horror or thriller do you find yourself most drawn to?

CT: Oh, that's interesting, isn't it? I don't have a specific type of book or genre I like to read, I don't think. I mean, I read all types of horror. I love a real mix, because I love thrillers and mysteries and horror. I quite like a good sci-fi sometimes as well. What I like, I think, is where people mash up genres. Where you start with one thing, but it becomes something else. I'm a big fan of a writer called Stuart Turton, who wrote a book called The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which is his first novel, which I loved because it took an Agatha Christie type of mystery, but threw in body swapping and time travel. I think someone described it as Agatha Christie meets Quantum Leap, and I loved that, because it was taking something that was so familiar to us, the murder mystery and the big old house, but throwing in all these other elements. So I really like authors who take a genre, such as a mystery or a crime novel or whatever, and then they move it slightly sideways and do something I'm not expecting with it.

NR: Are there genres or subgenres that you wish to explore in the future?

CT: Well, my new book has got some time travel going on in it, so I thought that would be quite fun, and actually it's a nightmare to write because it's got time travel involved in it. [laughs] But I wanted to do something, again, different. I'd love to do something a little bit sci-fi-y. I'd love to make it space. That may end up being a short story, because I might do a short story collection at some point.

And also the book after the one I'm writing, I kind of already have this idea in mind—again, it's kind of a various mix of genres. The nice thing about crime is I think you can make it anything, because as long as there's a crime, you can do what you want with the rest of it. It could be set anywhere, at any time, which I think is what's quite liberating about crime. You could put it in crime, but it could be in space, it could be in the past, it could be in the future, it could have vampires, it could have body swapping. As long as there's a crime, you pretty much have got an open playing field.

NR: Agreed. Thank you for taking the time. This has been an amazing conversation. And, listeners, you can get The Gathering on Audible now. Happy listening.

CT: Thank you so much for having me.