Worldbuilding What Ifs
I had a really good time at book club Q&A where they talked about my short story THE SNOW CHILD which I jokingly (no but really) say is the one nobody likes.
And they had some really good questions, so I thought I'd share some worldbuilding thoughts here.
One question was "why is 1917 the setting" and this actually plays into the worldbuilding of the story set in a rural English village.
It's a fae story with gloopy body horror, for a start, and I was thinking about the massive Home Front drive during WWI to send all the steel and iron they could to the war effort, which involved ripping up railings, collecting pots and pans, horseshoes, nails, stripping the iron out of your house that you could spare, and sending it all off to be melted down for bombs and bullets and so on.
This also happened in the 1940s, during WW2, when London's parks and gardens also lost a lot of their wrought iron railings and so on, and so I could have set the story around then, too.
So my question was, what happens to the villages which were left without a lot of iron around? That's surely going to leave you vulnerable at home to the fae, who are typically repelled by iron + iron alloys.
For this story, however, I wanted to mirror the futility and pointlessness of what was happening on the Western Front, with survivor's guilt, grief, and dealing with long absences and the unknown, and during WWI whole villages lost their entire population of men & boys of fighting age in a single day of a single battle, in some cases. The scale of the devastation at home was not like the Blitz and the WWII bombings, but the psychological trauma and bereavement trauma was something that almost everyone in the country was directly touched by.
I don't see many horror stories set in WWI that play with the psychological trauma of that loss at home, and I wanted to narrow my focus to a few characters who could offer different perspectives on that, while juxtaposing it with a supernatural threat.
One reader said that the real threats present in their home lives before the War vs the supernatural invasion threat during the War worked for them, which I was happy to hear; a "What If" I wanted to bring in was "What If the people at home are better off now that the father is at war, and the real sense of dread is not what if he doesn't come back, but what if he does?"
And to add to this, "What If the brother I desperately want to come back home instead of Father comes back different?"
And so I started to play with the fae and doppelgangers and that sort of thing, and the unrelenting futility of trying to be a hero in that situation, and it doesn't end all that well.
But that's where I started with this story, a series of "What Ifs" and some themes like loss, grief, absence, etc, that led me to 1917 as a setting.
This one isn't for everyone, and I think it would actually work a bit better as backstory for a 1940s-set story where this sort of thing happens again, and I would make 10yo Alice Martin a main character, or major side character, in that later book, as an adult.
But this is it, and a lot of people in book group said they enjoyed it, so I feel more confident in sharing it!
