“The Warm Hands of Ghosts” captures the apocalyptic vibe of WWI, with a supernatural twist

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Melissa Bendixen: Hello, listeners. This is Melissa Bendixen, an editor here at Audible. And I'm sitting down to talk with kids and adult fantasy author Katherine Arden, whose works include the Winternight trilogy and the Small Spaces series. Today we're discussing Katherine's new stand-alone historical fantasy novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts. Set during World War I, The Warm Hands of Ghosts follows the story of two siblings, Laura and Freddie, as they strive to find each other in the war-torn landscape of Belgium, with fantastical and apocalyptic obstacles in their way. Welcome, Katherine.

Katherine Arden: Hey, Melissa. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about my book today.

MB: Yeah, me too. So, as you said in a post on Goodreads, by setting a story during World War I you found a “history that refused fantasy.” But then in your author's note, at the end of the novel, you enlighten us on the many works of fantasy that come from the Great War. So my first question to you is, what first drew you to World War I? And why was it important to you to set The Warm Hands of Ghosts in this time period?

KA: Oh, that's a great question. I knew I wanted to do a stand-alone novel set in history with a fantasy element. It’s kind of something I really enjoyed doing with my first series for adults, the Winternight trilogy. And I was looking for a new historical moment to research and write about when, in a bookstore, I believe in Boston, I came across a work of nonfiction. It was called Pandora's Box. I forget the author, a German author. And it was a World War I history. And it had a picture on the cover, a picture of a German cavalry officer from the war holding this giant spear in his hands and wearing a gas mask. And it was the most surreal image you can imagine. You could easily see an AI having generated it. It was sort of a mix of knight-errants and techno-horror. It was a very strange picture. And it was taken in like 1916. And I'm like, "Wow. That picture could be in a fantasy novel."

So I started to do some research and discovered that the era of World War I, 1914 to 1918, was this moment of such profound change and such profound chaos, especially in Europe, but worldwide, that the fantastical almost seemed to sit, in theory, naturally in this time period. People were big into spiritualism. A lot of ghosts, a lot of belief in ghosts, a lot of belief in like, the veil, the afterlife, the other world. The world was changing so fast, and things seemed miraculous, right? The Wright brothers had just flown. People could fly. The X-ray was invented. You could see inside people. The submarine was invented, which had been science fiction in the years of Jules Verne, not that long before. And so it was a world that felt fantastical, even to the people living in it.

"If you move into the 20th century, the idea of a hellscape becomes very earthly... We think of Dresden, or Hiroshima. Or, you know, Passchendaele, during World War I."

And I guess, furthermore, one framing I saw of World War I over and over again was this apocalyptic framing. People referred to it as Armageddon, as the apocalypse, they talked about the Four Horsemen. And one thing I had done in my first book was I sort of mapped existing fairy tales and myths of a time and place onto their history, or put them into their history. So I made the myths and fairy tales real. And it felt like a foundational myth associated with World War I was the biblical apocalypse. And that was sort of the place where I started. I wandered far from my original notions. But that was kind of how the book got going, back in 2019.

MB: Yeah, that's interesting. So let’s talk about the research that you did for The Warm Hands of Ghosts. There must have been a lot of it. How did you immerse yourself in this time period, and what did you want to keep factual versus make fantasy for your story?

KA: I feel like I always wanted to have as much history as possible in this book. And with this moment in time, it was a moment of enormous literacy in the world, because it was in the era right before mass communications. There was no radio—yet. There was about to be. And so people who fought in this war had grown up where their only means of communicating, often of entertainment, was through letters and through reading. And so everybody in this war was very, very literate, and very verbal. It felt like almost everyone who survived the war had produced a memoir or had written many letters. There was so much in terms of primary sources to draw from when I was doing my research. Plus, there's been tens, hundreds of thousands of books written about the war as well. So I had an embarrassment, like a massive amount of material to work from.

And in some ways that makes it more challenging, because if you're a novelist, a writer of fiction, you're always trying to find your own path, your own way into your material. And you can know too much, right? You can be so inundated with facts that it's hard to find your way to fiction. If that makes sense. And that definitely happened with me a little, but my process began with a big trip to Europe. My now-husband and I toured battle sites along western fronts in France and Belgium for a couple of months back in the summer of 2019, and that was enormously helpful. I read documents, I saw sites, I got a sense of this atmosphere. That was really key. And then I came home and just dove even deeper into more memoirs, more nonfiction, and kind of built the book on the back of that research.

MB: Which parts of your research inspired the fantasy elements, do you think? And I'm particularly curious about the character Falland [the fiddler] here.

KA: One thing I noticed in my research early on is that almost everyone's memoir casually mentioned ghosts. Or casually retold a ghost story. "I saw my dead Captain." "My dead brother visited me and saved my life from a bombardment." Like, over and over, otherwise very, very sober memoirs with these recountings of real-life events would just throw in a ghost story, often.

It gave me this strong sense of people that were haunted, just by this war and this place for a lot of folks that died. And so I knew I needed ghosts. I wanted ghosts. Which really fit in with the time period, because of spiritualism and a widespread belief in ghosts. So that was part one of the fantasy. And the other part was, I mentioned earlier, that I felt like the biblical apocalypse was kind of my mythological starting point as I was trying to find my way into fantasy for this book.

And I'm reading over the Book of Revelations, the King James version, kind of getting the language into my head and thinking about it, and I came across a quotation that really struck me, where at one point the prophet says, in this book, "And I saw a new Heaven, and a new Earth, for the old had passed away." And my kind of rejoinder, my immediate question was, "I wonder if the prophet saw a new Hell, too?" Because it seemed like before the war, the idea of like a hellscape rested very much in the fantastical. You have John Milton's Paradise Lost, this grand city of pandemonium that the fallen angels build in Hell. You have Divine Comedy, like the Inferno, Dante's nine circles with the city of Dis, and like all these different incredibly baroque landscapes of torments and demons. I mean, you can go further back. You have Odysseus going to the Underworld. And it's very fantastical.

And then if you move into the 20th century, the idea of a hellscape becomes very earthly. I think when we think of 20th-century hellscapes, we think of Dresden, or Hiroshima. Or, you know, Passchendaele, during World War I. And this transition felt like it tied back in to my ideas about the world ending, right? The world changing. And, of course, my follow-up question to this was, "Okay, what does the Devil do in a hellscape created by people? What does he want? How does he act? Where does he go?" And that was a question that really fueled the creation of the fantasy elements of my book, in particular the character of Falland, the villain of the novel.

MB: I think you do a good job capturing all of it. There are some images I think that are going to be hard to get out of my head [laughs].

KA: It's quite a dark book in some ways. I definitely pulled a lot from history, and tried to also have a sense of hope and a sense of the future. But I think it's definitely a dark book in its framing.

MB: Yeah. But cathartic, I think, at the same time.

KA: I hope so. I was hoping for that, versus just dark, dark, dark. I wanted some sense of moving through it. But I was so fascinated by this time period for quite a long time. And I do hope some of that fascination with this history comes through, even though it's a speculative novel, not just a historical one.

MB: Right, definitely. Yeah, after you spent so long living in the world of World War I, did you find yourself, at the end of the day of writing and researching, having to turn to the light stuff and kind of cleanse from all of it? It must have been tough to be so immersed in it.

KA: Oh, it was really tough. I was very, very involved in it. Sometimes writing the book felt like walking into my little black hole every morning and just being in this space. So I pet my dog a lot. I like to garden, so I gardened a lot, and I also wrote a very, very, very cute picture book about a fish, which is coming out in September. Which was my other coping mechanism.

MB: That's good. I'm glad you did that [laughs].

KA: Yeah, it was absolutely my therapy. I was like, "What is the most adorable, lovely thing I can think of? Let's do that, too." It was my balance, for sure.

MB: Okay, good, good. This story has dual timelines from the alternating perspectives of Laura and Freddie, split by months as they search for one another. It really works to propel the mystery of Freddie's disappearance, and I was curious to hear how that element of the plotting went down for this novel? When did you land on the fact that there would be dual timelines?

KA: Right, so Laura and Freddie are the two main characters, these siblings. And, originally, in the first draft of the book, there was no Freddie point of view, it was just Laura, the sister. And she was still sort of searching for him, but he was kind of this abstract sibling that she was looking for. And the draft didn't work, in part because you didn't know this character of Freddie and so her search felt very abstract. It was like, "Oh, in theory, she loves this person." And we feel for her searching for him, but he didn't feel real enough to make you as a reader, or me as a reader, really care about his fate in the same way. So I was like, "Oh, I need a Freddie point of view to make this character come to life." And so I put him in and began writing his story and found that he balanced the Laura side really well. And found that moving between their timelines helped propel the book forward.

I had to sort of move them into two different timelines, because I was basing their stories around two different historical events. The first was Laura's event. It was the Halifax Explosion, which is a real thing that happened, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December of 1917. A ship in the harbor, which was loaded with munitions, with explosives, caught fire and blew up. And it was I think the largest single non-nuclear explosion in history. It leveled a huge part of the city. It was this huge disaster. In the novel, Laura, the main character, is sort of in Halifax for this explosion. And her story starts there. Whereas her brother, Freddie, is not in Halifax, he's still on the front lines. And he's participating in the real-life Canadian battle of Passchendaele, when the Canadian forces retook this village and this ridge in Belgium during the war, which took place sort of earlier, in November, October of 1917.

"The book got into how does memory relate to yourself, and how both your good but also your bad memories combine to create this structure of yourself, your personality, your mind, your soul."

And so their two stories start sort of off kilter, timeline-wise. And I had to balance how to move them closer together in their timing while still honoring the pacing of their stories. And so getting their timelines synced up was a huge writing challenge from a technical level on this book. I feel like also having them moving back and forth between points of view helped keep the story moving. I think an issue I struggled with is that I feel like World War I, the vibe is very sloggy. There's mud, there's rain, it just feels heavy. And I was worried about the book feeling weighed down. And one solution I had was short chapters and sort of quick switches between the two siblings’ points of view. Just to keep the book light enough, despite the subject matter.

MB: Light enough.

KA: That's all you can do, right?

MB: Truly, truly. Well, one thing that I think helped was that The Warm Hands of Ghosts is ultimately a sibling story, and even through the darkness there's love between Laura and Freddie that kind of overcomes all. And so I want to know, what was your inspiration for the characters of Laura and Freddie? And did you draw from your own life experience to create the deep bond between the siblings?

KA: I mean, I have a younger brother who I love dearly. I feel like it was more—it's funny, the relationship between life and art. I have never specifically sat down and said, "I'm going to re-create something in my life in a book." It's all pieces and patches and moments that kind of come through and make something new. In the case of Laura and Freddie, I began with Laura, the sister, and I knew I wanted to write a combat nurse, like a working nurse.

One thing that struck me in my research was you had two kinds of nurses: volunteers, who were young girls who would volunteer after the war started, often middle-class girls. And they would go and change dressings and learn about stuff. And you had professional nurses, who were women who had been trained before the war and were often already in the army, and they had the actual skill set to nurse on a professional level. And the memoirs were often written by the volunteers because they were middle-class and educated. The professionals often came from the working class, because during the time period, women weren't supposed to have professions. So ones that did, did so out of necessity, and it was kind of looked down on.

And so the tone I often got in many memoirs towards professional nursing staff was kind of derogatory, was kind of like, "Oh, those, you know, battle-ax ladies." And I didn't love it. I got that in many different books, and I didn't appreciate it. And so I wanted my main character to be a professional nurse, from the working class. Like, a woman who had chosen this profession before the war, had been trained, gone to war with the first round of nurses going abroad and worked through the war. She wasn't a dilettante or a volunteer or a charming girl. She was a professional. And that was kind of the core of her character. Something I really wanted.

And then her brother, Freddie, I wanted an opposition to Laura. Laura is sort of a modern woman, this main character. She's very tough, she's very educated, she's clever. Her profession is important to her, etc. etc. Freddie is kind of an old-world character, right? He's young, he's vulnerable, he's an artist, he's a poet, he's chivalrous. He's set in opposition to his sister, personality-wise, the same way these two worlds are colliding, right? The 20th century and the 19th century. And I was also inspired by a war poem by Wilfred Owen, a famous World War I poet, called “Strange Meeting,” where, in the poem, the soldier has died, and sort of underground he meets an enemy soldier that he killed. And they kind of have this conversation underground. And that was a huge inspiration for the way I launched Freddie's part of the story.

MB: Wow, yeah. That makes sense. So, let's talk about the narration here. What did you want Laura and Freddie to sound like in the narration? And what did you like about January LaVoy and Michael Crouch's narration?

KA: I mean, January LaVoy is incredible. Her voice is beautiful. It's just absolutely powerful. And just splendid. We had a long talk, actually, with my producer for the audiobook, about making them have Canadian accents and decided to go for more of a mid-Atlantic, kind of neutral vibe, just because the Canadian accent is hard to get right and can be a bit distracting if it's too strong. And so that was kind of our starting place, was "How should they sound?" And the ideal was mid-Atlantic. Sort of this neutral, kind of calm accent. And then from there we just had this long discussion about who would have what accent, because we have British characters, American characters. There's a supernatural character. How does he sound? And then with Michael Crouch and Freddie, I love that he sounds a bit younger in some ways than Laura, and he brings a vulnerability, I feel, which I think is amazing. And I'm so excited for everyone to hear the audiobook.

MB: Yeah, I think their voices were very accurate. It really turned out. So, do you think about memory differently now that you've written The Warm Hands of Ghosts?

KA: Do I think about it differently? That's a good question. I feel like the book got into how does memory relate to yourself, and how both your good but also your bad memories combine to create this structure of yourself, your personality, your mind, your soul. How you can't really rid yourself of the bad things, because they're part of this edifice that makes up you. And I feel like I hadn't really thought about that before I started writing, but it came out in the drafting process, and it became kind of this really central idea to the novel. How memory relates to self. There's like, obviously, Nietzschean philosophy on this topic, but I was definitely trying to write from a place where I felt like it was true and felt like it was true for my characters.

Writing is funny, because you are saying what you think as an author, but you're also not. You're trying to fit yourself into somebody else's thinking and thoughts and worlds, to greater or lesser success. It can be hard. Sometimes you fail. But every book you write also, I think, does change how you see the world as a writer, because it makes you verbalize and contextualize things you might have vaguely considered, but you haven't really considered something until you've found a way to say it in fiction. Because then you've really thought about it, if that makes sense.

MB: Yeah. That's true. And now you have to kind of stick behind your words, because they're published, and now you have to talk about them, too. And you have to think about it now when I ask you questions.

KA: It's true, it's true. You said it, you must mean it. I think you can get too far into place where it's like, "The author means every single thing she said." I think plenty of times authors will play devil's advocate. Or embrace something that maybe they didn't mean fully because they're curious about it. But the relationship between author and book is so interesting and so complex. Probably merits a book about it.

MB: I'm sure there have been some written, right?

KA: I'm sure, right? Someone's done it. Someone's definitely done it.

MB: Now, your first fantasy novels, the Winternight trilogy, were set in medieval Russia. I know you also lived in Russia for a few years. How would you say the places you've lived in and traveled to influence your writing?

KA: Atmosphere is my kind of one-word answer. I feel like I'm an author who loves atmosphere, I love the vibe of a place with ambience. And I like to convey that through my writing, how it feels to be somewhere. And obviously the combination of sights and sounds and smells. It's also just vibes. How do you convey vibes? I don't know. But being in a place that I'm writing about, or having been in a place that I'm writing about, helps me sort of internalize how a place feels so I can then convey it in prose later. And so living in Russia I think gave me this sort of sense of how I felt to be in this environment. Obviously it's very different in the Middle Ages versus the 20th, 21st century. But I like to think that some of the ambience of this geography, this world, kind of remains to pull from.

With the World War I research that I did in France and Belgium, it's funny, because the book is set in Belgium, in Flanders, right? This section of the front lines that was held by mostly the British army. But that part of Belgium doesn't have that many pieces of the war remaining. The territory was devastated by shelling, by artillery. But Belgium is small, they couldn't afford to just leave it devastated. So they rebuilt it. They pulled the bombs out. They filled in the ditches. They filled in the shell holes. They made it farmland again. So you can look at a map and see, like, "Oh, the battle took place here," but it's just a farm. There's cows. Maybe there's like a tiny cemetery in the cow pasture.

"I'm an author who loves atmosphere, I love the vibe of a place with ambience. And I like to convey that through my writing, how it feels to be somewhere."

France, on the other hand, they had massive swaths of territory that were devastated after the war. And they just took the worst ones and declared them like "Red Zones," these no-go zones. And just left them to go wild. And so in France, especially near Verdun, where this huge battle took place, you can see bunkers, trenches, rusty barbed wire in the woods. Random bottles. Bullet casings. Empty forts. Just out there in the woods, you know? Very unfiltered. Like, no one's put a museum around it. It's just there. And the ground itself is super unnatural looking, because it's covered in shell holes still. So it looks like the moon with trees. It's very, very disconcerting to see.

And there's definitely places in that part of the front line that feel very haunted. I'm not a big sort of looking-for-ghosts person in my own life, but there were a couple of times at dusk where I was like, "The ghosts are angry. We have to leave." Because the vibe is so—it's haunted. It's dark. And so if you're looking for World War I vibes, Verdun has them. In spades. Definitely. And it's a really interesting place to go as a traveler. To explore this sort of window into another time.

MB: Wow. Crazy. Oh, my gosh.

KA: Because the war was so stationary, right? So the same battles took place over years with the same pieces of ground, and so the ground just got pulverized by shellfire. A very static war. And so you can see a lot of the traces just from millions of people and millions of shells, just in this small area. You can still see signs in some places that say like, "Danger: Unexploded Ordinance." And it's from World War I. Because they're still pulling unexploded bombs out of the ground, 100 years later.

MB: Wow. I want to know if there's any places you've been to or found particularly inspiring from your past travels that you think is particularly ripe for a story? Hint, hint. What's next?

KA: I have a couple of things in my head. I want to do an Age of Sail book. Because I love, love, love, love sort of the Horatio Hornblower, Aubrey-Maturin sort of Age of Sail books. And I have an idea for a historical fantasy which I'd love to do. I think my next book's going to be a little more low-key, in the sense that I did so much research and so much work for The Warm Hands of Ghosts, and I'm hoping to just do a quieter book with less research and less scope. And that's the book I'm working on now. I don't want to give too many details. It's not historical. Set in the modern day. But there is a fantasy element for sure. And then I have an idea for like an Old West, like an American West book that I'd love to do. I have an Age of Sail idea I'd love to do. And I have an idea set during the French Revolution that I'd also love to do. So, I have like a bunch of ideas percolating. I usually do. It's often just which idea I feel like tackling. But I love historical fantasy, and speculative fiction. I'm so excited to explore new worlds with it.

MB: Well, I am very much looking forward to whatever you write next. I have followed you through light and darkness now.

KA: Oh, you definitely have. Next thing is the fish book. It is very light. It's called The Strangest Fish. And it is as light as possibly can be. So I am excited to be moving to a lighter direction now.

MB: I'm excited for you too. Like, you made it through. You know? Everyone learned some things.

KA: We all learned things. The characters, me, my publisher, everyone. The whole crew.

MB: [Laughs]

KA: And everyone stuck with me throughout the writing process, and I am incredibly grateful, because it was a long one.

MB: Yeah, but it's very rewarding at the end, I'll say. It was very satisfying the way you brought it all together.

KA: Thank you. I wanted it to come out the way it did. I think it was the right level of emotions, I feel like. What I was going for. And it's always satisfying for a writer to hit the conclusion they wanted.

MB: Yeah, I can imagine. Thanks so much for your time today, Katherine. I enjoy your work so much, and I will continue following you through whichever path or whichever place you go next.

KA: Thank you so much, Melissa. I was so glad to be here, and so happy to hear your great questions and try to answer them. I hope folks have gotten something out of it. It's a wonderful moment for me as an author, so thank you.

MB: Yeah, I'm happy to provide [laughs].

KA: [Laughs] Thanks.

MB: And listeners, you can find The Warm Hands of Ghosts and Katherine Arden's other stories now on Audible.