Since both her grandmothers were successful novelists (Margaret Kennedy and Leonora Starr/Dorothy Rivers), it's only natural that Alex Marwood would eventually turn her hand to the genre after an initial career as a journalist across the British press. Her first novel, The Wicked Girls, was shortlisted for the ITW, Anthony, and Macavity awards, included in Stephen King’s Ten Best Books of the Year list, and won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. The Killer Next Door, her second novel, won the coveted Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel and was nominated for the Anthony and Barry.
Her latest is The Poison Garden, a novel about cults and cult thinking. When divorcee Sarah Byrne agrees to foster a teenage niece and nephew she never knew she had, she quickly finds that the challenges of parenthood are greatly multiplied when the children have grown up in a cult. Eerie, blonde children who finish each other’s sentences and, though fascinated by the outside world have no interest in adopting its values, they politely block her attempts to bond, fail to make friends, and quickly attract the attention of bullies at school. Soon, Sarah is wondering if she has made a terrible mistake.
Meanwhile their adult half-sister Romy is placed in a hard-to-let flat by Heathrow airport, alone and searching for her siblings in a world filled with mysteries and dangers. Romy, pregnant with a child that she believes to be the future savior of humanity, is looking for a way back to what remains of her former community. And the only way she will be allowed back into the fold is to rid the world of pretenders to her baby’s crown. Pretenders who include her own fifteen-year-old sister…
Alex explains more about writing the novel:
When I started writing this book, I fully intended to make it as straightforward as it could be, coming off the back off The Darkest Secret, which was quite a headache to write. But the more research I did, the more complex the whole thing became, because cults, in the end, are all about how we relate to the world, the assumptions we make and our desire to get along, and the fact that all of those elements of the human character are more easily manipulated and exploited than we like to believe. So it’s about power—the taking and seceding of it—about family, about the wish to belong and the wish to do the right thing, and how those drives can be turned against you. It’s about the power of ideas and how becoming too rigid in your beliefs will make you a prisoner. It’s about the human ability to fight literally to the death against ideas that challenge the ones we hold dear.
[The inspiration is] so many things. It’s a subject that’s always interested me. The world as it is at the moment is full of them—they seem to be coming from every side, from anti-vaxxers to flat earthers to Trumpites and Antifa in the States and Corbynites and both sides of the Brexit debate in the UK, Extinction Rebellion everywhere. And, of course, the twisting of belief that led to Al Quaeda and, later, ISIL. Cults are literally everywhere, right down to the microcosmic cultism you see in the eyes of your average narcissist in the full flow of an ego-protecting tantrum. This book’s been a long time coming, honestly.
I’m very slow, because I always think I’m going to plot ahead of time and always lose endless time to going up the blind alleyways before I accept that I’m not that sort of writer.
So once I really start, it’ll be from character. I’ll have the setup—in this case, the mass suicide at Plas Golau and the stories of the ones who survived, and some loose idea—happy or tragic outcome, not much more than that—of where I’m going to go with it, but then I just have to write thousands and thousands of words exploring the people and their world before I finally know them and hit the place where the book itself begins. Things often reshape and reshape as I’m going along. A couple of times I’ve literally not seen a huge twist coming until I was in the middle of writing it, though when I go back I’ll see that I’ve completely set things up to lead to that point, subconsciously.
It’s very wasteful and I’ll never manage to be a book-a-year writer as a result, but it’s the only way I know how to write. I’m also an obsessive editor as I go along. I’ve been writing a TV script of The Darkest Secret with a wonderful, patient American collaborator, and I’ve been driving him half-mad with my “God, can we go back and redraw those last three episodes before we go on please?” ways—but I think he’s actually starting to accept my approach, up to a point. I am really envious of people who can do a vomit draft and then rework it into something readable, but I just can’t. Carrying on writing when I know that something isn’t right yet fills me with a paralyzing existential dread.
You can learn more about Alex Marwood and her books via her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The Poison Garden is now available via all major online and brick-and-mortar booksellers.
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