Surgeons House with Jody Cooksley
Surgeons House with Jody Cooksley
There is a book out this week that will take you inside the deep dark recesses of a home for women who have fled their abusers. It will take you into dark graveyards and mortuaries. You will hear whispers of what went before in a small museum…are you brave enough to meet Ms Cooksley, your guide?
Books by Jody Cooksley
Jody Cooksley (c) Lillian_Spibey
Books by Jody Cooksley
I knew when The Small Museum was finished that I wasn’t done with the characters in that book and writing a sequel is exciting because it’s like picking up old friends, you get to imagine how their lives turned out – in this case 10 years on from the original story. It’s a development of themes and style imagined a decade after Dr Lucius Everley was hung for the work uncovered in his evil small museum.
Books by Jody Cooksley
The themes of patriarchal oppression, the tension between scientific progress and morality, and the enduring impact of trauma are all in there to be continued and as I wrote the book I knew they would prove to be themes that resonate strongly with contemporary life. Ours is a similar era to theirs in many ways, not least because they were undergoing an extreme industrial revolution that threw into question what it means to be human, just as we are grappling with the rise of AI and the impact it will have on societies.
Putney Bridge
Books by Jody Cooksley
The novel is set in Putney, where Evergreen House is located. At the time, Putney would have been more of a village or small town, separated from London City by countryside. Evergreen is one of the large villas on the heath and other locations in the novel include a fictional public house, a slum street by the railway sidings that has long been built over and the mortuary at Putney Burial Ground where Martha works. Martha is one of my favourite characters, a woman who would have made a brilliant doctor but is prevented from most medical work because of her sex.
Putney Burial Ground
Books by Jody Cooksley
Evergreen House is a sanctuary for women and children who have escaped from their abusers and it’s run by Rebecca who suffered at the hands of the evil Everleys, the former proprietors. For a decade they have begun to heal and tried to move on from the horrors of the past; after all, the Everleys are all gone, except for Grace who is safely incarcerated in an asylum. But a series of brutal murders and the sense they are all being watched has Rebecca and her family believing the past has returned to haunt them.
Books by Jody Cooksley
I’ve definitely played more on the elements of crime in this one and the novel even begins with the words ‘It wasn’t my first corpse’. There is a post mortem in a public house, because that’s where they took place then, the only places large enough to offer a table and space for the attending viewers. Some publicans used to charge for the spectacle, just as unscrupulous wardens used to charge voyeuristic thrill seekers for going into asylums, another thing that happens in this book. But despite the gruesome elements, the creeping Gothic tension has always been the main appeal for my writing because I enjoy psychological drama – encouraging the reader to stay inside the head of the protagonist and feel what they feel or fear what frightens them.
Church in Putney
Books by Jody Cooksley
It’s that element of the human response that interests me. Of course there are dramatic plot twists, we all want action in our stories, it’s what keeps us turning the pages, but I’m more interested in the emotional impact, how events change what happens next. Because novels work best as explorations of character and how characters change through the things that happen to them.
Though this book is full of suspense, I’ve also tried to fill it with emotion and human stories. Overall, what I wanted to create after the horror of The Small Museum was a reflection on both resilience and forgiveness. I hope that it will encourage readers to consider the things that give us peace, to think about how we view our pasts and to understand the importance of creating safe spaces for those who need them.
Thank you Jody!
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Books by Jody Cooksley
Twitter: @JCooksleyAuthor
