Susan Hill: The story of the night

Susan Hill has never had what she calls a proper job. She has lived by her writing since her first novel, The Enclosure ("a juvenile mistake"), was published while she was still at school, in 1961. She has written 16 novels including The Woman in Black, of which a stage adaptation has been running in the West End for 20 years, Mrs de Winter, a sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and four crime novels featuring detective Simon Serrailler. She has also written or edited eight books of non-fiction, two autobiographical, as well as four collections of short stories and a dozen children's picturebooks. She has worked as a reviewer for newspapers, starting in the 1960s; she has run her own publishing company, Long Barn, for the past 11 years, with a backlist of 30 books; and she has a regular and popular blog. Until now, however, she had not written a full-length children's novel. But she likes a challenge, so The Battle for Gullywith (Bloomsbury, £10.99), for 7-13s, is published this week.

This experiment with genre was prompted partly by having friends with children of that age, which made her think about why children liked reading what they do and "what it was that used to grab me". The picturebooks she once wrote were inspired by her own daughters' problems – "issue books", about, for instance, dealing with nightmares. One Night at a Time came out of a habit of "wrapping up Jessica's bad dreams in a bundle, throwing them out of the window and shutting it tight". Jessica, then four, would say in the morning "I heard them scrabbling to get in, but they couldn't." Jessica is now a happily married grown-up, Hill's youngest daughter Clemency is at university, and Hill long ago stopped thinking about picturebooks.

But she has not quite stopped thinking about nightmares. She writes mysterious books, in which there is often something uneasy-making. Some are ghost stories. But nothing about her makes you uneasy: she is comfortable, chatty, energetic but not frenetically so; informally and unostentatiously erudite, speaking fast and in complete sentences with a literary frame of reference. When she arrives a bit late for coffee in London's Soho, she has reassuringly texted to explain being stuck behind a dustcart.

The Battle for Gullywith is more magical dream than scary nightmare, and has a happy resolution. It does use, to riveting effect, a sense of encroaching unease as malevolent magic infiltrates domestic circumstances. As a child, Hill loved other worlds but wanted her fantasy rooted in reality. She knew Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by heart and liked that Alice is an ordinary girl until she sees the white rabbit. She also enjoyed the unexplained oddness of, say, playing-cards coming to life. Not everything in her new book is accounted for; we are left unsure how human some of the characters are.

The story begins with the vividly described departure of 10-year-old Olly from the only home he has ever lived in, on his way to a ruin in the country called Gullywith, which his parents have bought in pursuit of a rural idyll. Our first inkling that all is not well is when a pebble in Oliver's pocket seems to burn him. A small stone moves down the stairs of the empty new house. Chillingly, stones accumulate when no one is looking, as forces that want to reclaim Gullywith marshal an ever-growing army of them. The book does for pebbles what Hitchcock did for birds.

So where does this characteristic talent for creating unease come from? Hill speculates that her earliest childhood memories have something to do with it. "I was born in 1942, and because of the blackout, there was no street lighting. You couldn't even take a torch outside. When I was three or four, and we went out in the dark, I would feel there might be something there... And I can just remember the air raid siren, and seeing my father going off in his tin hat on air raid duty while we had to go down the stairs into the cellar until the all-clear went. People were nervous. And you weren't sure what was in the corners. There was a real enemy linked to all these slightly spooky things."

Home was in Scarborough, which was relatively safe, though German bombers did sometimes lighten their load on the way home from missions to Hull. "For children who live through a war, I think the climate never leaves you. Whatever the outcome and however much the rest of their life is fine, it's there." Growing up happily and safely after the war, Hill found that she could turn these feelings to her advantage and use them in literature.

For children, though, she has tamed the fears. One of the strengths of her book is that, while she can do spookiness, she is also very good at children's dreams come true: midwinter revels in an ice palace where the ice cream is hot and the entertainment acrobats and butterflies and dancing Cossacks who whirl you around; a castle that rises from a lake in a shower of fireworks; sleigh rides under the stars; fairgrounds and fancy dress... Hill had fun.

"I wanted to write a story children would want to get into," she says. "I wanted parts that were lovely, warm and magical to balance off the sinister bits. And I love doing scenes lit from within or without. Like the scene in Hardy's The Return of the Native where Clem Yeobright and Damon Wildeve are dicing on Egdon Heath at night, lit by glow-worms. I have... set-pieces I want to do and then I join them up like a string of beads. I even do it with the crime novels."

The book tells the old story of good against evil, but it does not build to a last battle. Unexpectedly, the antagonists are reconciled. Hill – married to Shakespearean professor Stanley Wells – thought afterwards that her book recalled The Tempest, with a Prospero figure who seems to have a conjurer's powers. "So many Shakespeare plays end with this: 'our revels now are ended', and there's a dance or masque, and it's a resolution." The message for children might be that you can come to like people you never thought you would. Hill's relish of revels has spilled over into the creation of a website with games and Gullywith-related activities; and into a launch party (all are welcome) at the Jaffe and Neale Bookshop in Chipping Norton, from 10.30am tomorrow (5 April).

Hill and her husband live in a remote Gloucestershire farmhouse with 50 acres. There she writes daily, and answers email queries from pupils who are studying her books. She is happy with her essentials: books, something to write on, coffee and tea, a wood fire, a dog (a Border terrier), candles, and Radio 4. And she looks out on sheep, and wild countryside. She says she could never bear to leave.

The Battle for Gullywith was originally intended to be a one-off novel, but Hill could not resist revisiting the world she had made. The sequel, The Clockwinders of Wythern, will introduce a strange new boy at Olly's school and indulge Hill's long-held fascination with drowned cities – fabled Atlantis and Lyonesse, from the Arthurian legends, and Dunwich, the real submerged seaport on the Suffolk coast.

Despite her wish always to link the fantastical to the familiar, she could never write all about a gritty reality. "A lot of children with problems or dysfunctional families must find it very reassuring to read Jacqueline Wilson – that sort of problem-solving is something fiction can do well – but I couldn't do it." Olly's loving family is only bad-tempered under stress, and he is a kind elder brother to his baby sister.

Hill worked out the only domestic sadnesses she has ever known in non-fiction. Her book Family dealt with her miscarriages after Jessica's birth, and the birth and death of her second daughter, Imogen, who died at five weeks old. "It was cathartic, and the book helped to put it all 'over there'. But it is still very important to me that people – and official records like my child benefit book – acknowledge that I had three children."

Now Hill is enjoying a burst of creativity that echoes the prolific 1970s, when she produced eight books in as many years. Gullywith is one of four books in 13 months. A ghost story, The Man in the Picture, came out in October; a new Serrailler crime novel, The Vows of Silence, appears in June, and a literary novella, The Beacon, comes in November. It all sounds like much more hard work than most proper jobs.

Biography: Susan Hill

Susan Hill was born in Scarborough in 1942, the only child of a dressmaker and a clerk. She read English at King's College London, and has written 37 books, including a crime-fiction series. The Bird of Night (1972) won the Whitbread Prize and was Booker-shortlisted. The Woman in Black (1983) was adapted for the stage with lasting international success. In 1975, Hill married the Shakespearean professor Stanley Wells; her daughters were born in 1977, 1984 and 1985. She wrote about the loss of her second child in Family (1989). She has lived in the North Cotswolds since 1990 and founded Long Barn Publishing in 1996. She blogs at blog.susan-hill.com. Her new children's novel, The Battle for Gullywith, is published by Bloomsbury

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