After reading through the latest chilling horror novel from Titan Books, All The White Spaces I had a chat with author Ally Wilkes about what it was like creating this terrifying tome of a book. My review for the book can be found here.
This is your first published novel, was it a daunting process to create this book?
I think creating any book is daunting, but All the White Spaces was in many ways an absolute labour of love. They always say to ‘write what you know’, but I set about writing a historical novel (taking place 100 years ago) set in Antarctica (a place I’ve never been) from the perspective of a trans man, which added a whole new challenge: it was really important to me to portray Jonathan’s identity sensitively and accurately, and some of the most creatively fruitful – and interesting! – parts of the process were working with my wonderful sensitivity readers to try to make that happen.
It was also my first ‘finished’ novel – by which I mean the first one I’d taken through the painstaking, tear-your-hair-out processes of rewriting, restructuring, editing, line editing, going back to square one… I think it taught me everything I now know about writing, to be honest. Daunting certainly, but also wildly educational, and I wouldn’t have changed any of it!
What inspired the story behind All The White Spaces?
This book really combines a lot of the things I love: survival horror, Antarctic exploration, and supernatural chills. In that respect it was simply a matter of taking my favourite things and putting them in a blender! But more seriously, I’ve always been fascinated by the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, in which small teams of woefully under-prepared men pitted themselves against the unforgiving forces of nature for the sake of abstract ideas such as ‘discovery’, ‘sacrifice’ or ‘England’. It’s a fantastic setting to really dig into some of the tropes of the adventure novel, and a very atmospheric one as well: reading some of the accounts of early expeditions, I was always struck by off-hand remarks about how creepy the place was! For example, here’s Apsley Cherry-Garrard (from Scott’s doomed expedition) talking about spending the night in some abandoned huts: “The whole place is very eerie… not only do I feel it but the others do also. Last night after I turned in, I could have sworn that I heard people shouting to each other…”
What really brought All The White Spaces’s story into focus, however, was the idea of a post-WW1 setting. This came to me from a remark by Francis Spufford in the introduction to my much-loved copy of Shackleton’s South: “the concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches”. Immediately I knew I wanted to take all those Edwardian certainties and fracture them with the horror of the Great War, creating a narrative propelled by grief and loss – and that this was where the supernatural element would come in.
The horror of All The White Spaces is very much a slow build, with the tension growing over time as things get worse for the characters, rather than some kind of monster running around causing chaos. Do you prefer that kind of horror over monster stories?
I think both types of horror absolutely have their place! Some of my favourite novels place the ‘monster’ up-front and centre, like The Terror by Dan Simmons, by using framing devices such as a split timeline to allow for both a slow build and to put the characters in danger from day one. But I’m very much drawn to books which take a little bit longer to spin out the atmosphere and dread, particularly the sort where you start to fall in love with the characters and don’t want anything bad to happen to them… I think Dark Matter by Michelle Paver is a great example of this, or anything by Andrew Michael Hurley.
With All the White Spaces, I found that it demanded a slower build as a function of the type of story it was telling: a historical coming-of-age story with seafaring elements rather like C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. It felt natural to want to take the readers on a journey, as Jonathan goes on his journey, and since the horror they meet is very particular to Antarctica itself, it couldn’t show up immediately! I had a lot of fun leaning into that.
Whilst the book has a horror focus it’s very much a story of people, especially Jonathan. What made you choose Jonathan to tell this story, and did you always want to tell a trans story?
Thank you! I think my favourite part of this book has turned out to be the characters – they were such a joy to write, and I learnt so much about each one as I went along.
The choice of Jonathan as a narrator was integral to the story I wanted to tell, which was about the very stereotypically ‘masculine’ worlds of the trenches and Antarctic expeditions, often viewed through similar lenses: bravery, sacrifice, glory, teamwork, and so on. But at the same time both worlds had some fascinating things to say about gender, I thought: there was a lot of nuance in how those men interacted, showed emotions (Scott, for example, ‘cried more easily than any man I have ever known’ according to Apsley Cherry-Garrard), and expressed qualities which at the time might have had ‘feminine’ connotations. For anyone who’s interested in this area, may I recommend Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, and Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain by Jessica Meyer?
Coming back to the question, I wanted a protagonist who was an ‘outsider’ to both those worlds, but not through choice: someone who’d been held back from taking their rightful place. While I played around with the idea of a character disguising their gender (yes, I grew up reading Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books), once I started writing All the White Spaces it became very clear to me that Jonathan was a trans man, although he wouldn’t necessarily have the language to express that clearly. I thought this opened up some fascinating avenues to explore within the story, not least in his relationships with the other men, and was excited to write the book from this – hopefully – quite fresh perspective.
The book features some queer elements, and not just Jonathan being a trans man, was it important to you to include queer voices in a historical setting where they often get overlooked?
Absolutely. I think that sometimes readers can (consciously or unconsciously) put a lot of pressure on a sole character to encapsulate the whole range of queer experience, which is both reductive and impossible. It was very important to me that Jonathan didn’t stand alone as the only queer voice in the book. And I’m fascinated by the hidden histories of queer people and how they coped in historical settings which might have been less accepting or understanding of diverse identities – although it’s important not to take that as a given! One of the things I was delighted to discover in my research was how some queer people were able to live more or less openly in settings we wouldn’t necessarily expect. I wanted – in some small way – to emphasise that queer people have always been here, living their lives.
I understand if you’re not willing to reveal, but the entity or force behind the frightening events is never definitely revealed in the book; do you know what it is, and can you reveal anything about it?
I don’t want to spoil anything for readers, as the exact nature of the supernatural force is an open question throughout much of the book, but yes: I do know what it is, and it was inspired by some of those very haunting, eerie descriptions of Antarctica in the writings of famous explorers.
You managed to really capture the harshness of survival in such an extreme place, and you included some pretty horrific moments. What kind of research did you have to do to make the book historically accurate, or did you take some creative freedom with what you did?
Thank you! I feel with any book like this there’ll be a necessary blend of research and creative licence: I think it’s best summed up by the approach of Stuart Turton to his fantastic historical thriller The Devil and the Dark Water, as per his Afterword: “This is historical fiction where the history is the fiction.” I wanted to create a world which felt real and immersive by using as much detail as possible without weighing the reader down. This started with reading some of the fantastic accounts by Polar greats such as Shackleton and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and expanding out to more modern books which weave together the journals, diaries and letters of the explorers with a factual account, such as The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis.
Of course, there was also the War to consider – I read a lot of first-hand sources from soldiers at the Front as well as books about things like the Casualty Clearing Stations, shell-shock, underage soldiers, and conscientious objectors. I did some physical research, too – visiting Scott’s Discovery in its dry dock in Dundee (which became the base model for the Fortitude, with some notable tweaks), going on a vintage sailing ship in the Baltic Sea in vintage costume (brr!), and learning to climb ropes to help me understand Jonathan’s love of the rigging. But my overarching intention was always to create an enjoyable reading experience, and you can’t research anything and everything, so yes – there was definitely some creative licence used!
There have been some great horror stories set in isolated, frozen locations. Are you a fan of any of these stories in particular?
I don’t think there’s a better ghost story than Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter. The isolation, the desolate location, and the absolute spine-chilling horror – it’s a masterpiece. I’m also a fan of her Thin Air, which has some similar themes (the fallen hero, brotherly rivalry and affection) to All the White Spaces. For a totally immersive experience it’s very hard to beat The Terror by Dan Simmons, which makes the most of those tantalising gaps in our knowledge of the Franklin expedition while being utterly grounded in reality at the same time. And my other favourite from recent years is The White Road by Sarah Lotz, which ticks off two of my morbid fascinations: horrible caving disasters and the rising death roll on Everest.
Is the character of Macready a nod to Macready from The Thing? And if so, is that a particular favourite of yours?
The name must have stuck in my head for some reason – I love coincidences like that – because I didn’t actually see The Thing until I’d already finished the first draft! Rather stubbornly, I refused to watch a film about ‘a shape-shifting thing in Antarctica’ because I worried it’d be too similar to All the White Spaces – whereas in fact they couldn’t be more different in most respects... And yes, now it’s a favourite of mine. It’s such a paranoid, atmospheric film, and the practical effects are genuinely unnerving.
This is your debut book, but are you working on anything else at the moment, can we expect to see more from you soon?
I’m happy to say that I’m working on my second novel, tentatively entitled What Passes Through. It’s set in the 1800s Arctic – because I simply had to go there! – and will combine my love of spookiness and my morbid fascination with survival cannibalism.
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