Well I’ve been reading a lot of Victorian fiction to stay immersed in that era, but I also love keeping up with contemporary writers working in the genre. When you’re in the mood to read, who do you choose? I chose to write it in Victorianesque prose, so the language was really important too.Ĥ. It’s also a more complex book, in that I was halfway through it when I realised there was a whole other layer of events going on in Halfoak village than I’d suspected. I thought at first it would be onerous, but I rather fell in love with it.

It’s the first book I’ve set entirely in a historical era and the first one I’ve set in Victorian times, so the research was vital. How does it differ from your previous novels? A rational Victorian man of the city goes off to a little rural village to investigate what happened to his cousin, and soon comes into conflict with the old superstitions, even beginning to wonder if the ‘hidden people’ really do live in the hollow hills.ģ. The Hidden People takes a similar murder as a starting point. There was a case in 1895 where a woman was burned to death on her own hearth because her husband accused her of being a changeling and apparently tried to scare it away. It’s an incredibly creepy idea, that the person sharing your house or your bed isn’t who you think they are. One aspect I keep returning to is that of changelings, where fairies steal someone away and replace them with an old worn-out fairy or stock of wood, bewitched to look like them.

I’ve been obsessed with fairy tales for a long time, and I love how the ‘little folk’ used to be represented in the older lore – sometimes benevolent and sometimes wicked, so that any encounter with them could be perilous. What was the inspiration for The Hidden People? I had a busy year in 2016 with the launch of my sixth novel, The Hidden People, a short story collection called Quieter Paths and a book called Five Feathered Tales, which was produced in collaboration with a talented illustrator friend, Daniele Serra.Ģ. I’m a horror/dark fantasy/just plain weird writer (take that how you will, ha har), hailing from Yorkshire, England.

First of all, what do new readers need to know about Alison Littlewood? She lives in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls in Yorkshire, England, and has a penchant for books on folklore and weird history, Earl Grey tea and semicolons. Alison’s short stories have been picked for several ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies and she won the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction. Her other books include A Cold Season, a Richard and Judy Book Club selection Path of Needles, a dark blend of fairy tales and crime fiction and The Unquiet House, a ghost story set in the Yorkshire countryside. Alison Littlewood’s latest novel is The Hidden People, set in Victorian rural society, and is about the murder of a young girl suspected of being a fairy changeling.

The Crow Garden by Alison Littlewood