Helen Brown, ,

Waterstones Books Quarterly, Issue 32

Be warned: Helen Oyeyemi’s superb latest novel might see you looking over your shoulder. ‘I had lots of nightmares while writing White is for Witching,’ chuckles Helen Oyeyemi, ‘and dark shadows shifted around my bedroom wardrobe.’ The 24-year-old author loves reading spooky stories, from Henry James to Stephen King, and has ‘a blast’ writing her own. But she can still give herself the creeps.

Born in Nigeria and raised in London, Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), while studying for her A levels. She told me back then that its unsettling supernatural chill was partly inspired by her parents’ African superstitions. ‘If you write a person’s name in red, that means they’re gonna die,’ she told me. ‘And my mum is really serious about not whistling in the house because it invites spirits. You try to reject it rationally, but you can’t. Once you grow up in that, the world can just flip. You just need to press some kind of button for everything to go wrong.’

‘And although I got away from the ghostly stuff with my more serious second novel [The Opposite House, 2007],’ she says today, ‘I realized I have more fun when I’m being disturbing.’ White is for Witching was written while Oyeyemi spent a year doing volunteer work in South Africa. ‘I stayed in a huge house, sleeping alone in one dark, weird wing. And I was reading Dracula, too. So I got into hauntings and vampires. Plus, I had assumed I’d find South African racism rather interesting. But I didn’t. I found it boring, oppressive and sad.’

These powerful impressions all fused in Oyeyemi’s mind while she sweated through a fever. ‘And I thought: what would happen if there was a racist house? And I thought that house might be in Dover.’ So in Oyeyemi’s dark, dark house above the white, white cliffs live teenage twins Miranda and Eliot. They’re bright, modern kids, grieving for their mother but cherished by their father who runs the house as a B&B. Miranda suffers from depression and pica, a medical disorder which causes people to eat non-food materials. Oyeyemi says: ‘One of the most famous literary examples of pica appears in Dracula, when the “morbidly excitable” character of Renfield is observed guzzling flies and spiders while “possessed” by his bloodsucking “master”. In Miranda’s case, she becomes addicted to chalk.’ And as she gets thinner things get freakier.

What’s so good about White is for Witching is it poses gnawing narrative questions: is the sinister ‘goodlady’ drawing her strength from behind the house’s walls? Or is her ‘unnatural appetite’ for other girls the problem? Whatever the cause, we know from page one that Miranda Silver lies in the ground beneath the Dover house. And her throat is stoppered with a slice of apple.