We Call Them Witches: Interview with India-Rose Bower

Helena Davidson: The witches in your novel drive the horror, stalking protagonist Sara and her family like prey, but they’re very different from the witches we might imagine from popular culture. How did you come up with the idea of these unearthly creatures? 

India-Rose Bower: It’s not hard, growing up in the countryside in Yorkshire, to see creatures like the witches. Out on walks as a kid, I’d avoid certain twisted trees, marvel at rock formations with names like the Sleeping Giant. My mum would tell us stories about the frogspawn that looked like eyes peering up at us from the pond. My grandad pointed out strange markings on drystone walls that could only have been made by something otherworldly. When you spend your childhood monster hunting, that particular, peculiar way of seeing things sticks with you.  

My witches come from our darkest fears. For centuries, words like witch have been used to describe anything that scares us. Illness, death, children going missing, (women with agency). In Sara’s world, the threat comes to them nameless, and so they put a name to it, anything to make themselves feel safer. A name that’s shorthand for danger, death, fear.  

I was also inspired by generations of eldritch horrors. Plenty of authors have taken creatures we feel we know – faeries, trolls, vampires – and dialled them back to the original fears that plagued people. A.M. Shine and Adam Nevill are two authors who returned to the dark roots of well-known creatures. Podcasts like Malevolent and The Magnus Archives both explore old, crawling fears in a way that focuses hard on the humans trying to survive them. I literally couldn’t finish Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, because his interpretation of a witch scared me so deeply (I ended up wrapping the book in a pillowcase and hiding it in a wardrobe).  

We’ve all been frightened by the familiar before, by the way our dressing gown hangs on the back of the bedroom door, like someone standing over you while you sleep. Things we see every day, know the names of, the dimensions of, turn monstrous so very easily. When my grandad would tell us the story of Hansel and Gretel, he’d put on a voice that crawled through my bones and made me laugh at the same time. Our worst fears are familiar – and then unfamiliar.  

HD: Your characters are often on the move, constantly having to navigate deserted villages, foggy moors and dark woods to find safety. How much has your experience of the Yorkshire landscape influenced your writing? 

IRB: I was lucky enough to live in the same house for my whole childhood. I got to know the landscape in my immediate vicinity so well I can still walk it in my head now. We spent most weekends out in the woods or getting lost on the moors. All the local reservoirs and lakes were my own personal adventures, each with their own set of monsters and stories.  

When I became ill with chronic pain and fatigue, my ability to explore those places dwindled to nothing. I could barely walk down to the end of the street and back, and after every attempt, I’d have to sleep for two days. During lockdown, when there was no real impetus to go outside and, in fact, it was even illegal to spend too much time outside, I would go months without stepping foot out of the door.

When I finally, slowly, started to get out again, nature was the thing I searched out most. It took (literally) years before I was able to regularly see trees and rivers and fields, but it taught me just how much I’d missed it all, and just how much my health depended on that landscape. I’d been in pain and depressed, but I’d been sort of home sick too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started writing Witches in the same year that I started returning to nature.  

It’s not just the landscape, though. It’s the people who inhabit it. Every place has its own stories and folktales, and the stories in Yorkshire are so deeply embedded with its history. Farmers trying to ‘catch’ spring to keep winter from freezing the ground and starving their children. Smugglers hiding their barrels in the canals, only to make up fantastical lies when the police find them. It’s all industry and poverty and family. Every little town or village has its own story, and some of them have more than one. Some of them are relatively new, even, gossip about a neighbour who grew up next to the Yorkshire Ripper, or that one flood in the 70s that washed away half the graves in the churchyard.  

You can’t separate these stories from the landscape, and vice versa. We’ve carved ourselves into it. We’ve dug out canals that hollow through the hills. We’ve walked paths into the moors, laid down cobbles to make it easier to carry our coffins to the nearest graveyard. There are barrows and burial mounds hidden in the peat, and old railway tracks being consumed by brambles. You can’t walk for half an hour in Yorkshire without coming across some sign of industry. It’s sad, sometimes, a little bit scarred, but when you grow up somewhere like that, it becomes a comfort, almost. Seeing evidence of other people, knowing you’re not out there on your own, because those woods and moors can sometimes make you feel like the last person alive after the end of the world. But also, seeing the way nature takes things back. Some strange mix of ‘thank god I’m not alone’ and ‘thank god we won’t always be here’.  

HD: Despite the characters facing a stark post-apocalyptic world, they’re often able to find moments of happiness. Did you prefer writing the moments of levity, or do you thrive on writing the more terrifying scenes? 

IRB: Writing happiness and warmth always makes for a nicer writing session. I have so much to pull from – my family, while it isn’t always idyllic of perfect, has always fiercely loved one another. I have hundreds of playful, sweet memories to influence my writing, and sometimes it’s a relief to sink into a pleasant scene. 

But if I’m kicking my feet under my desk, it’s because I’ve just put someone in a nightmare. Writing fear is unbelievably therapeutic, and I’m sure there are plenty of authors who’d agree with me on that. Getting to explore my own fears in a way that’s safe, controlled, but also makes me question why that particular thing scares me so much. It’s fun, too, seeing how much you can make your readers’ toenails curl. Sometimes, when my partner reads a scene and doesn’t pull faces, I’ll go back in and ramp up the squickyness. 

I love writing gore and grossness, but my absolute favourite thing to write is terror. How different people react to it, the characters who freeze, the characters who launch into action, the held breaths, the muscles that ache from holding so still, the fear that shifts into anger, just to make it bearable. It’s such a deep well of emotion with different facets, but we all know it intimately.  

The thing about horror is, you can’t have fear without light. If your characters (and so your readers) have nothing to hope for, no contrast to the darkness, then the fear gets defanged. It’s like the people at the beginning of a horror film or in the first five minutes of a Buffy episode. You don’t know them, not really. You don’t know their likes or interests, the people they love, their favourite book when they were a kid. When that couple gets jumped by vampires in that alleyway, it’s sort of moot. It’s not that you don’t care that someone’s scared or hurt, it’s just that you have nothing to compare it to. You’ve never seen them not scared and happy. It’s why the opening of Scream works so well, not only do you get a good chunk of time where Casey is just happily setting up her evening of popcorn and movies, but you also get to see her parents and their fear for her. You get the hope, you get a taste of these people’s normal life, and then you see it get ripped away from them.  

So yes, I love writing the terror. But a creature with doll’s eyes is only scary because we’ve seen a kid holding that same doll while they sleep peacefully.  

HD: Horror and romantasy are really popular genres at the moment – what were your literary influences while you were writing your novel? 

IRB: I only got into horror in my early twenties. It took me a few years to get through the basics, Scream, Stephen King, exorcisms, and so by the time I was beginning to write Witches, I was also exploring the deeper niches of the genre. It’s not always easy to find horror authors; bookshops and libraries generally only have small horror sections, if they have one at all. Finding horror readers on social  media, especially on Booktok, helped to introduce me to a whole new realm of horror writers. This was the year I discovered Stephen Graham Jones (and I’m certain this changed the course of my whole writing career). He writes teenagers, especially, with such a clear voice that it almost carries you back to a time when you were that age. They stay with you. I realised I was missing his characters whenever I finished reading one of his books.  

It was also the year I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia and T. Kingfisher for the first time and discovered how two different adaptations of the same story (Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher) could draw out such different aspects, and how fear resonates differently in different authors.  

It was the year I explored folk horror (A.M. Shine and Camilla Bruce), analogue horror (Hannah Bervoets and Eric LaRocca), and horror that was deeply rooted in its setting (Francine Toon and Daniel Shand).  

Consequently, it was the year I first started writing horror. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been writing, but it was always fantasy. It leaned into the darker elements of fantasy, but it was always firmly rooted in that realm. When I discovered how much I loved reading and watching horror, I decided to explore that love in my own writing. We Call Them Witches is what came of that experiment.  

HD: The narrative is steeped in folklore and pagan ways. Tell us more about your inspiration – did it come from your own life experience, or was it a new line of research for you?  

IRB: I came to folklore and pagan rituals in two very distinct ways. First was through my family. My grandad was a consummate storyteller; even when he was talking about football, he made it sound like an epic tale. It was a trait echoed in my mum, who read stories to me before I was even born, and my aunt and uncle, whose house was always full of instruments and folk songs. My grandma has the most beautiful garden, and she’s spent years trying to teach us all about the flowers she grows there, their names and their properties. She and my grandad were also part of a Morris dancing group – the Slubbing Billys. Morris dancing groups (sides), if you don’t know all that much about it, all have their own folklore, the reasons why they dance a certain way, wear certain things. We’d go to the folk festivals every year and watch the Mummers, the dancers, listen to the songs.  

I was steeped in rural, working-class stories since before I could copy the dance steps, and then I started passing them down too. I’d have camp outs with my little sister where I’d tell her stories of the monsters in the woods. She was always wary of the ivy growing at the end of our garden, because I’d told her it was an entrance to the fae realm. That’s the important thing about folk tales – you’ve got to pass them down, keep them going.  

The second way I came to rituals was through my OCD. A key part of this disorder is compulsions, ritualistic behaviour. The common examples you might have seen on tv or read about are turning light switches on and off repeatedly, hand washing, lining up pens in a certain order. For me, it was always strange little rules that I had to follow to keep my family protected. For years, I couldn’t step on a particular stair. If I did, I had to ‘cleanse’ myself by walking repeatedly over a rug. I had to smile at myself in a mirror before I left the room (still do sometimes) or else something would happen to the people I loved.  

When I first started picking up folk traditions again, I remember my mum worrying. When I told her I’d bought a pack of tarot cards, for instance, she warned me to be careful that they didn’t start ruling my life. I have little pouches of protection spells hung up near the front door. Learning how to lean back into that world without it becoming unhealthy or obsessive was one of the things that helped me calm my OCD. Being able to pull a tarot card and take it as advice, rather than a proclamation, being guided by calm intentions rather than fear. I don’t know if I believe in any of it, really, but for me, it’s become a safe way to incorporate old folk rituals back into my life. It won’t work the same way for everyone, but it definitely helped me.  

HD: Finally, your main character Sara seems to experience a coming-of-age as the story develops. What are you most looking forward to as your own novel ventures out in the world and comes of age? 

IRB: It’s scary, putting your work into people’s hands and not knowing how they’ll react to it. It’s been made so much less terrifying, though, by the lovely, wonderful community I’ve met. Writers and publishers, people working in the industry, but early readers too! People have shared gorgeous pictures of their copies, they’ve messaged me about their favourite parts or just to tell me that they’re making all their friends read it too. I work in a library, and last week I looked my book up on the catalogue out of curiosity. It showed up, and there are already people queued up to borrow it.  

I’ve met other horror writers and readers, and it truly is the most loving community. I think horror fans are a bit like metal music fans; they seem scary, but they’re the most warm, welcoming group of people you could hope to meet. I’m just so looking forward to this quiet, solitary thing of writing becoming a doorway to community. I want people to meet Sara and her ridiculous, caring family, and see their own families (the one they were given, the one they chose, or both) in them.  

It might be mean, but I’m also excited to put people’s own morals to the test. I want to scare them and unsettle them, I want people to consider what they’d do in Sara’s shoes. My family and friends spend (probably too much) time talking about what we’d do in a zombie apocalypse. I can’t wait for people to wonder the same thing about the world of Witches. I can’t wait to hear which parts scared them the most, which characters they loved or hated.  

I’ve always loved sharing stories with my siblings and my friends; publishing a book is that on a much bigger scale. Folk tales were always a way to pass on knowledge, about what things were safe or unsafe, or about important seasonal traditions. We’ve told stories forever, to instruct, to comfort, to entertain. I really do believe it’s what makes us human. Even people who struggle to imagine things in their mind’s eye tell stories. There’s no guarantee of what I’ll get from telling this story, but I hope it’ll be understanding and community.

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