Culture & Arts31 Oct 2026 · about 6 min

‘I was channelled into writing by forces that took me hostage as a receptacle’

The brief

Being “channelled” means the author experienced the novel as arriving through them rather than being fully directed by them. The story emerged in many voices, few recognisable as their own. This matters because the writing became both mysterious creation and emotional survival. The author describes feeling like a “ventriloquist’s toy,” driven by forces and powers they did not understand. The manuscript brought violent visions and unexpected epiphanies. While writing the chapters about Marcus and Munro, friends said the author’s face turned bluish grey. The scenes still petrify them. The experience shaped the novel’s unusual structure and atmosphere. The author calls it a vehicle of healing, acceptance, and surrender, born during intense grief and hurt. Decades later, the story’s terrors still feel powerful, suggesting that writing beyond conscious control helped preserve its emotional force.

What does the author mean by being “channelled” into writing, and what experiences made the writing feel beyond their conscious control?

The author describes feeling like a “ventriloquist’s toy,” driven by forces and powers they did not understand. The manuscript brought violent visions and unexpected epiphanies. While writing the chapters about Marcus and Munro, friends said the author’s face turned bluish grey. The scenes still petrify them.

The experience shaped the novel’s unusual structure and atmosphere. The author calls it a vehicle of healing, acceptance, and surrender, born during intense grief and hurt. Decades later, the story’s terrors still feel powerful, suggesting that writing beyond conscious control helped preserve its emotional force.

What is The Book of Shadows, and why does the title have a connection to Wiccan and witchcraft traditions?

The Book of Shadows is a complex horror novel built from several narratives and voices. It explores grief, trauma, misogyny, isolation, evil, and the possibility of healing. The title matters because it links the fictional story to a real tradition of preserving hidden knowledge.

In Wiccan practice and older witchcraft traditions, a Book of Shadows is a personal testament. It records esoteric practices and knowledge gained. The novel reflects that idea through its old Himalayan house, whose secrets, memories, and supernatural histories are entrusted to Bitiya.

The title therefore works on two levels. It names a tradition’s private record, while also suggesting the novel’s own archive of horrors and revelations. As the story moves through colonial cruelty, occult power, ghosts, and trauma, the book becomes a record of what must be confronted and remembered.

Who is Bitiya, and how do her acid attack, isolation, and return to her Himalayan home begin the novel’s central story?

Bitiya is the novel’s distinctive framing voice and a young university lecturer from Delhi. Her face has been disfigured by a brutal acid attack, leaving her humiliated and traumatised. Her retreat begins the story’s movement from public violence into private memory and supernatural mystery.

She returns to the old family house in the Himalayan foothills, facing the snowbound Kumaon range. There, the ancient caretaker Lohani ju gives her care and affection. He knew her as a child and is wise, protective, loving, and responsible for the house’s many secrets.

The setting isolates Bitiya from her former life while surrounding her with layered histories. The house contains colonial violence, occult activity, ghosts, and memories that reach across generations. Her damaged body and withdrawn life connect present-day misogyny and trauma with the older horrors embedded in the place.

How many years passed between the novel’s first draft in 1994 and the author’s return to it described in the article?

The first draft of The Book of Shadows began sometime in 1994. The author later returned to the story after roughly three decades, making the interval about 30 years.

The article does not give a precise return year. Instead, it says the author has “returned to the strange story” penned three decades ago, while describing horror as newly powerful in the present. The safest figure is therefore approximately 30 years.

That long gap matters because the novel survived beyond its original moment of creation. The author believes its terrors now ring even truer. The return turns an old manuscript into a renewed encounter with grief, violence, social anxiety, and the enduring human need to confront ghosts.

What consequences do grief, trauma, and the experience of writing frightening scenes have for the author and the novel’s characters?

Grief and trauma shaped both the author’s life and the novel’s purpose. The book was written during intense hurt, as the horrors of life seemed to swirl around the author. Yet it also held a thread of belief that helped lead them out of that horror.

The writing itself produced strong physical and emotional effects. Friends said the author’s face changed to a bluish grey during the chapters about Marcus and Munro. The author says those scenes still petrify them. Bitiya, meanwhile, lives with the consequences of a brutal acid attack, disfigurement, humiliation, and isolation.

These consequences give the novel its moral force. Horror is not only spectacle; it reveals trauma, misogyny, cruelty, and vulnerability. The author presents good and the sacred as capable of confronting evil. The book’s lasting power comes from turning frightening experience into memory, testimony, and possible healing.

What is Himalayan gothic, and how do the isolated mountain setting, the old house, and its caretaker create the conditions for this kind of horror story?

Himalayan gothic is a form of gothic horror that uses the Himalayan landscape, isolation, old buildings, hidden histories, and supernatural uncertainty. The article presents the caretaker as a traditional feature of such tales. This setting matters because distance and silence make buried horrors feel close and inescapable.

Bitiya’s childhood house faces the snowbound peaks of the Kumaon range. She retreats there after an acid attack, separated from her former life. Lohani ju, the ancient caretaker, provides affection but also guards the house’s manifold secrets. The colonial journal reveals that the house rests on savage cruelty.

The mountain setting creates a closed world where past and present overlap. The old house becomes an archive of violence, occult practice, memory, and ghosts. Its secrets can surface through documents, caretaking, and supernatural encounters. The landscape remains while people and memories change, allowing the horror to endure.

What are Wicca, occultism, and the Indian aesthetic concept of Vibhatsa, and how do these traditions understand magic, terror, and the grotesque?

Wicca is a modern religious tradition associated with ritual, nature, and magic. Occultism broadly concerns hidden knowledge and practices, including magic and esoteric study. Vibhatsa is one of the Navrasa, or nine core emotive markers of Indian aesthetics; the article describes it through the grotesque and terrible.

The article connects these ideas to the novel in different ways. A Wiccan Book of Shadows records personal esoteric practices and knowledge gained. Marcus and Munro follow Aleister Crowley and pursue sensual gratification and satanic power. Vibhatsa gives horror an aesthetic language for disgust, terror, and the ghastly.

These traditions do not all mean the same thing. Wicca can frame magic as religious practice, occultism as hidden knowledge, and Vibhatsa as an emotional and artistic response. Together, they help the novel explore why people seek forbidden power and why grotesque horror reflects the anxieties of its society.

This brief was written by AI from the original reporting and checked by other models. Names, figures and quotes come from the source; read it for full context.