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Jump to navigationJump to searchCliff McNish Talks To Bookbag About The Hunting Ground (view source)
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'''THE HUNTING GROUND'''
In my latest ghost novel, [[he The Hunting Ground by Cliff McNish|THE HUNTING GROUND]], I wanted to create a truly monstrous adult ghost, but I was equally interested in the little ghost girl locked away with him. Every ghost story should have a little girl in it somewhere, don’t you think? It’s the story of two boys (Elliott, 16, and his brother, Ben, 14) who are taken by their dad to live in a huge mansion called Glebe House. Their dad renovates old houses, so the boys are going to be stuck there for awhile. And the problem, of course, is that it’s not empty.
I must admit I knew straight away in THE HUNTING GROUND I wanted to create a classic evil ghost – someone absolutely ice-cold terrifying. One of the nice things about a real villain in fiction in a story as a reader is that you can hate them. It’s nice sometimes to be given permission to hate a character without reservation or limit. We like doing that. But there’s another point about true villains. If you create a really nasty character, there’s really no limit to what they will do to get what they want, and the reader knows this. It gives your story a terrific amount of tension that more watered down villains simply can’t ramp up.
