His new novel, The Damned, is Andrew Pyper at his finest. It's a gripping, terrifying read about Danny Orchard, a man who's famous for a memoir recounting his experience having briefly died and returned to life. His memoir doesn't tell the whole story though—that when he came back to life, he brought the spirit of his psychotic twin sister back him, and that she haunts and torments him in death as she did while she lived.

But now Danny has fallen in love, and finally has a reason to live—which makes his sister all the more determined to destroy his chance at happiness. And so the siblings are forced to meet again in a spectacular showdown between good and evil, heaven and hell, set against the fascinating backdrop of modern-day Detroit. 

Andrew Pyper answered our questions about this setting, how The Damned fits into his oeuvre, and about just what mysteries might be waiting beyond heaven's door. 

*****

49th Shelf: Detroit, in your novel, is literally a level of hell. Can you tell me more about the city as your muse, and how the city’s history connects to the themes in The Damned?

Andrew Pyper: In a way, The Demonologist and The Damned are novels connected in the way they are projects of reimagining ancient mythologies—demons in the case of the former, and the underworld in the case of the latter. The ground rules for both were that the fantastical elements of the stories would remain grounded (to the extent possible), and that the world of the stories would be our world: contemporary, skeptical, post-spiritual.

Keeping this in mind, when the question came up of what the “hell” of The Damned would look like it was rather late in the game. The story was well into its construction, the characters walking and talking and alive (at least to me). But where would their drama play out? I considered many alternatives, and had a debate with my editor about one of them in particular, but in the end, after a research trip to Detroit, I knew it could only be there. The metaphorical significance of its pride and fall are obvious, of course, as well as the visual bounty of its ruins.

But for me Detroit is the underworld of The Damned because it’s always been a city of discrete boundaries and levels: streets dividing whole universes of class, of race, of fate. Even among American cities, Detroit is about profound—often invisible—borders. And to cross them without authority to do so is to enter another part of yourself just as much as it is to enter another part of the city. 

49th Shelf: Were you surprised to learn that The Boy Who Went to Heaven did not actually get there after all? 

AP: With a name like Malarkey? Not so much.

But that’s not to say I don’t find many similar accounts persuasive, and certainly fascinating. When I read the testimonies in Patricia Pearson’s excellent Opening Heaven’s Door, for example, I find that, collectively, there’s something inarguably real about the shared—and often quite weird, or ecstatic, or frightening—experiences of death, such as they’re known to us.

49th Shelf: The Damned is a detective story within a horror—Danny Orchard is tasked with uncovering the truth behind the death of his sister. What freedoms have you found within the confines of genre?

AP: To me, genre offers existing structures—and pleasures—that can be fused with others to create new structures (and pleasures).

I don’t think about this aspect of the work too much; it’s just the way my imagination has always been calibrated. It may come from a youth of wildly undirected reading: Hardy Boys and Graham Greene and Stephen King and Alice Munro and James Herbert and a subscription to The New Yorker. I mix and match and only see the mixing and matching once I’m done (and sometimes not even then). It’s like I’m performing some kind of Frankensteinian surgery with my eyes closed.

49th Shelf: Once again, you’ve written a book that subverts the notion of home/a house as a place of safety. What is it about the domestic, the familiar, that’s so terrifying to encounter in a book like The Damned? (It occurs to me that the houses of Detroit are a literal embodiment of this idea…)

AP: When it comes to creating fear, I’ve always felt that less is more. (Canadian restraint? Protestant horror?) My goal in writing a scene of suspense is to set things up in a way that the smallest gesture or action—a teaspoon moving an inch across the table on its own, the sound of a turned tap on the other side of a closed door—provides as much if not more impact than a fanged ghoul tearing through a wall. It’s why so much of what’s scary in my novels is located in the home: the familiar, the everyday, the seemingly harmless.

Even though a good portion of The Damned takes place in the underworld—a fantastical location if there ever was one—I sought to keep the novel earthbound, plausible, its world recognizable as the one we inhabit. I love fantasy, but in my own work, I want to keep a lid on the things that might take us out of the internal weighing of “Could this be real?” And there’s nothing more real to the human sensibility than home. 

49th Shelf: How is The Damned connected to your previous works? How is it a departure?

AP: I see The Damned coupled with The Demonologist in some obvious ways: contemporary re-contextualizations of ancient mythologies of darkness, specifically demons and the underworld. But this project can be seen in all of my work as broader than these two books alone (though they speak to these existing mythologies more directly than perhaps the previous books).

It took me this long to see that what I’ve been up to all along is doing my take on existing narrative traditions, genres or folklore in each book (the haunted house in The Guardians, the courtroom murder mystery in Lost Girls, etc.). Now the mythologies have gotten bigger, in the sense that their sources are biblical, classical. But I’m trying to do the same thing: knit my version of an available narrative strand that makes sense to the world we live in now, and (broadly speaking) the generation I belong to as it ages.

49th Shelf: How did the inspiration for the story come about?

AP: I was noticing a lot of talk about heaven. Memoirs of those who visited there and returned, claims of “proof” of its existence, the possibility of scientific (multi-dimensionality, etc.) explanations of where we go when we die. An explosion of material about the afterlife. Almost all of it hopeful depictions of green meadows populated by those we’ve loved and have passed on, all waiting to embrace us in Eternity. Naturally, my wish is that these accounts are true. But my imagination has its own inclinations.

If that’s what the penthouse looks like, what about the boiler room? If I had to invent my own cosmology of the after-world, what would be its rules? Dante had his levels and punishments and boundaries. What would be my Inferno?

Andrew Pyper is the award-winning author of six internationally bestselling novels. Lost Girls won the Arthur Ellis Award, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and appeared on the New York Times and Times (UK) bestseller lists. The Killing Circle was a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year. Three of Pyper’s novels, including The Demonologist, are in active development for feature film.