Marrowstone, Jefferson County, the island that serves as the setting for Seattle author Cherie Priest’s new haunted house novel, “The Drowning House,” is an almost stereotypical horror setting.
“It’s like 6 square miles, shaped like a long finger, and there’s nothing much on it except the old military base, Fort Flagler — and most of that’s been decommissioned,” Priest explains.
Marrowstone Island has a population of fewer than 1,000 people, and it’s perhaps best known for its gorgeous Salish Sea coastline, including the intriguingly named Mystery Bay. If you were to travel to Marrowstone via the lone bridge that connects it to Port Hadlock-Irondale, Priest says, you’d see that “there’s nothing there. It’s just one road up, one road down.”
Priest encountered the island while scouting out a setting for her latest book, and she enlisted her friend, local sci-fi fantasy author Kat Richardson, to join her on a research trip to Marrowstone.
“It was a grim and gloomy fall day,” Priest recalls. “It was just perfect. We spent a couple days just driving around and taking pictures.” They explored the abandoned military base and Mystery Bay — “I’m like, come on, you people are making this too easy,” Priest laughs about that name — and she decided Marrowstone Island was the perfect setting for her haunted house story.
About that haunted house: It was inspired by an online news story Priest read about a mysterious mansion that washed up on a beach in El Salvador.”
“There was a video of tourists just wandering around inside this thing wide-eyed,” Priest recalls. “It’s a big stucco building, halfway buried in the sand.”
Lately, Priest has been enraptured with the idea of haunted houses — “The Drowning House” is one of two haunted house stories she’s written in the last few years. She’d read tons of stories where newcomers encounter a haunted house, but she couldn’t recall reading a story where the haunted house is the newcomer to town.
The image of a creepy, old, waterlogged home washing up on a Marrowstone beach was too sinister to ignore. But she decided to make a generational shift away from the Victorian mansions that have dominated the genre for decades.
“If I’m going to do a modern gothic,” Priest explains, “it needs to be a midcentury modern.”
Priest has always been interested in the idea of houses and homes. After her parents divorced when she was 5, she and her sister bounced back and forth between their places.
“My dad was in the Army and he moved every few years,” Priest explains. “We just kind of cycled in and out of housing for most of my life that way. I’ve moved dozens of times.”
That fascination with living spaces continued into adulthood. One of Priest’s first professional writing gigs was for a Tennessee real estate magazine called The Home Finder. She got married and moved to Seattle, and her adoration of Bill Speidel’s Underground Tours of the subterranean depths of Pioneer Square inspired Priest’s most popular novel to date, the 2009 Seattle-set steampunk zombie thriller “Boneshaker.”
Priest has been restlessly exploring different genres, which she alternately describes as either “following [her] bliss” or “being ADHD.” She published two Seattle-set mysteries, “Grave Reservations,” which landed her first book review in The New York Times, and “Flight Risk.” Earlier this year, Priest published a self-described “cozy horror” novella set in Tennessee called “Cinderwich.”
Though they spin off in very different directions, “The Drowning House” and “Cinderwich” feel very much in conversation with each other. They both feature friends investigating supernatural mysteries that tie back into forgotten histories of the two disparate places that Priest has spent most of her adult life. The “Scandinavian weird,” as Priest calls it, of “Drowning House” is alternately chillier and more expansive than the claustrophobic Southern gothic of “Cinderwich.” But both stories are set in rural American communities where the past somehow feels more vibrant, more populated, than the future — the perfect atmospheric conditions for haunting.
Priest is excited to finally publish “The Drowning House,” but she’s also deep into a couple of projects: the second haunted house book, which is set in West Seattle, and a novel “that is entirely different. It starts with an old man dying of a heart attack in a basement library. It’s a comedy.”
“I don’t know if anything will ever break through for me again,” Priest says. If any book lands her back on the bestseller lists, “it will be the crazy thing that nobody wanted. That’s what ‘Boneshaker’ was — a shot in the dark.”
So she’s just putting in the work every day in the hopes that audiences will come. “I write pretty quickly. I tend to draft within a couple months and then put it down, let it cool off for a while, and swing back around when I feel like it,” Priest explains.
Most days, she says, she gets to sit down at her computer, dig through her prodigious imagination, and ask herself, “What’s shiny today?”
