PHOTO: Beth Castrodale, author of four genre-crossing novels, merges historical nuance with psychological intrigue and gothic flair.
Exploring Fiction With Heart History And Haunting
Award-winning author Beth Castrodale reflects on her passion for gothic architecture, psychological suspense, and empathetic storytelling across literary fiction, thrillers, and horror in her richly imagined novels.
Beth Castrodale writes with the quiet confidence of an author deeply attuned to the inner lives of her characters and the rich, often uncanny textures of the worlds they inhabit. Her novels unfold across diverse terrains—a Depression-era corset shop, a cemetery haunted by memory, a house whose architecture seems to think for itself—and yet they are bound by a shared commitment to emotional truth and psychological nuance. Whether crafting literary fiction, thrillers, or gothic horror, Castrodale explores how the past imprints itself on the present, how spaces hold stories, and how grief, guilt, or longing shape perception.
Her latest novel, The Inhabitants, is a triumph of contemporary gothic fiction: a chilling, intelligent work that examines trauma, justice, and the psychological architecture of power. A portrait artist inherits a Victorian house whose builder believed design could influence the mind—a premise that unfolds with both elegant eeriness and pointed cultural resonance. Like the best horror, The Inhabitants reveals not only what we fear, but why we fear it.
Across all four of her books—from Marion Hatley to I Mean You No Harm—Castrodale weaves themes of identity, artistic vocation, and moral complexity with unflinching empathy. Even her most damaged or dangerous characters are rendered with care, and her prose never loses sight of the human pulse beneath even the darkest material.
Castrodale’s work reminds us that the literary and the speculative need not be separate realms. Instead, they can co-exist—haunting one another—until the boundary between memory and myth, reality and imagination, feels thrillingly porous.
In The Inhabitants, the protagonist inherits a Victorian house whose architectural features were designed to influence the mind. What inspired you to merge architecture’s psychological power with a modern gothic narrative?
I’ve always loved Victorian architecture and gothic literature, and The Inhabitants melds these interests. The (fictional) nineteenth-century architect who designed the protagonist’s home introduced features he hoped would have beneficial effects on the mind, but when the protagonist begins to have unsettling experiences in the house, she begins to suspect otherwise.
Your protagonist in The Inhabitants is a portrait artist. Why did you choose to have visual artist at the center of a novel featuring supernatural phenomena?
I thought a visual artist would be especially attuned to the unusual architectural features of the house she’s inherited. As mentioned previously, these features were designed to influence the mind.
In I Mean You No Harm, the protagonist’s late father, a career criminal, leaves her a legacy of dangerous, unfinished business. How were you able to write about his crimes authentically?
I researched a variety of criminal activities, from how money laundering works to how murders can be made to look like suicides. I also researched the structures of criminal organizations.
Because the protagonist is troubled by a stalker, I also researched what drives stalkers psychologically, and what they do to try to exert power over their targets. I also researched recommended approaches for dealing with threats from stalkers.
In This Ground is set almost entirely in a cemetery—what drew you to explore grief through such a liminal space?
Since my childhood, I’ve been fascinated by cemeteries—I think, because they gesture toward the lives and stories of each person who’s buried there. For In This Ground, I thought an ideal intermediary between the stories of the living and the dead would be a gravedigger; thus, I made the protagonist a gravedigger (and a former indie rocker). In addition to emotionally supporting the loved ones of those buried in his cemetery, he’s trying to manage his grief over the death of a former bandmate of his, who is buried, literally, under his feet.
Marion Hatley centres on a Depression era corsetiere. Why did you choose to write about this era and profession?
The novel was inspired by my maternal grandmother, who helped to run her family’s farm during the Depression and who wore uncomfortable corsets while doing so. I wanted the protagonist of Marion Hatley to design a truly comfortable corset for working women like my grandma.
As founding editor of Small Press Picks, how has your editorial experience shaped your approach to your own novels?
The novels and story collections I’ve reviewed for Small Press Picks have taught me invaluable lessons about craft and helped me think of strategies that I might apply in my own fiction. For example, I hardly ever write from the first-person point of view, but having seen several writers use this approach effectively, I’ve started to experiment with it.
You’ve woven #MeToo themes into The Inhabitants—how did you balance cultural commentary with supernatural suspense?
I tried to have the #MeToo angle emerge organically. In short, the protagonist tries to exact revenge-by-painting against a portrait subject who assaulted a dear friend of hers years before. In this way, the #MeToo angle is in keeping with the protagonist being visually attuned to her experiences and surroundings, including the unsettling house she moved into recently.
What one piece of advice would you offer aspiring authors hoping to write psychologically rich literary fiction rooted in historical or fantastical settings?
When writing psychologically rich fiction (or, really, any type of fiction), I think it’s important to show empathy for your characters, even the ones who seem the most unsympathetic. If this empathy isn’t apparent in the writing, readers will probably be less inclined to care about the characters and what happens to them.
