Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Sara Levine writes about The Hitch from Roxane Gay Books.
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The Hitch is about a woman whose life explodes when her six-year-old nephew confides he is possessed by the soul of a dead corgi. Last month a journalist interviewed me about the novel and, in response to a question about horror fiction, I rattled off all the books with possession plots I had read as preparation.
William Peter Blatt’s The Exorcist was important, I explained to the journalist, as was Sara Gran’s Come Closer and Paul Tremblay’s brilliant Head Full of Ghosts. Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black was in the back of my mind, and John Wyndham’s Chocky was in the front. I admired Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism but sadly, I only discovered Guy de Maupaussant’s The Horla after I turned in the book. Using my well-oiled professorial voice, I explained how possession plots helped me to think about reader expectations. Some expectations I intended to satisfy, others I intended to thwart.
What I didn’t confess: the debt I owe to subReddits—those corners of the internet where people speak sincerely of being possessed by demons, and other people respond with strategies, solutions and prayers. Early on, I read William J. Baldwin’s Healing Lost Souls: Releasing Unwanted Spirits from Your Energy Body, and Edith Fiore’s The Unquiet Dead: A Psychologist Treats Spirit Possession. But books by people who claim to have developed a system for releasing “attached entities” are one thing, and internet forums where people are typing, in the middle of the night, their own, often desperate and unfinished, stories, are another. In The Hitch, an offstage character claims to have been taken over by the soul of a man who died in his ambulance. That story isn’t mine at all; it belongs to an anonymous poster on Reddit.
Seven months after turning in the book, these books and internet leavings are what remained at the top of mind as “research.” But a few days after I gave the interview, I opened a folder on my laptop and found a “punch list” for revision, dated 2021. Among the many tasks I listed were these:
- Use the snow covering things more. Weather as incremental perturbation. Go back to Christina Rossetti’s snow poems since they hint at religious mystery—things being covered.
- Look at Mary Karr talking about learning to pray and see if there’s anything in there about the embarrassment of becoming spiritual.
- Reread Christmas Carol, last chapter, and give Rose some of that manic glee when Victor and Astrid return.
This list reminds me that a lot of the research I do as a writer I do piecemeal and on the fly. When I wrote Treasure Island!!! I read countless books on Robert Louis Stevenson, several books about adventure fiction, and three books on parrots. For The Hitch I read the entity possession books I mentioned above, as well Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, to help meliken the corgi ghost’s invasion to the workings of the microbiome. That’s the kind of research you can easily tell a journalist about because it’s related to the novel’s subject. But a different kind of research that I really love to do is what I’m describing above. I have a specific problem—something the story needs that is beyond my own linguistic or technical grasp, and I go to another writer to see how they did it, or to see if there’s anything I can borrow or pilfer. These borrowings, or thefts, whatever you want to call them, drop from my mind once the book is finished.
Ahead of time I might know I need a book on theme (the role of the adventurer in Western culture, or the mechanics of spirit possession), but I couldn’t have known I would need Dickens’ A Christmas Carol until I was floundering in a crucial scene.
In the punch list, I’m ordering myself to go back and read things I have already read—often years earlier. So in that sense, I am doing research all the time for my novels. I just don’t know, at the time, that I’m doing it.
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Sara Levine is the author of the novel Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Her essays, stories, and aphorisms have appeared in various magazines including The Iowa Review, Nerve, Conjunctions, Necessary Fiction, Sonora Review, and others. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago, IL.