Alexandra Sokoloff ('The Unseen', 'The Harrowing')

By Alan Kelly

Alexandra Sokoloff is a screen-writer well established in California writing novel adaptations (like the thriller Cold Kisses) for various Hollywood studios like Sony, Miramax and Disney. A graduate of UC Berkeley where she majored in theatre and minored in just about everything else. Sokoloff has had three extremely well-received novels published: The Harrowing, The Price and The Unseen and is collaborating on a vampire trilogy with Heather Graham and Deborah Leblanc, which is due out next year...

Sokoloff explores themes of loss, loneliness, things that may be at the edge of our awareness or merely manufactured traumas created by the unnerving worlds her characters inhabit, plunging her readers into terrifying occult realms. Her novels are slices of supernatural realism which are fast, punchy, clever and chock-full of creepy intrigue.

Structure seems very important to you. Do you map your novels out before beginning; I ask this because many writers I’ve spoken to freewheel a bit, a consequence of this is that they get lost?

Oh, yeah. I do index cards of the plot, I do outlines of sometimes seventy or eighty pages, I do collage books of visual images… I’ll have generated a whole thick notebook of material before I sit down to the first draft. But all of my books so far are mysteries as well as supernatural, so I have a lot of interweaving plots that I need to get right, at least marginally, up front. I can’t imagine not mapping all that out. And I still get lost – that’s what writing is, isn’t it?

Thank you, glad it’s useful! I find that when I’m stuck in a story that all I have to do is reread my own articles and do my own assignments and I miraculously get unblocked. Physician heal thyself and all that!

You’re writing a paranormal thriller for Harlequin Nocturne, the second book in a New Orleans witch and vampire trilogy? Vampires are in vogue again – Do you enjoy writing about a traditional supernatural creature or do you prefer the more ambiguous approac h to writing horror?

What I tend to do is base my stories on supernatural occurrences as they are reported by real people in real life – my trademark is to impart a sense of psychological reality to a psychic or supernatural situation. And in the trilogy (called THE KEEPERS), my book is actually about a kind of modern witch dealing with shapeshifters, which I think of as archetypal energies, very Jungian and also very Voodoo, so it’s not really far off from the ambiguous, reality-based supernatural that I normally write. Although because it’s a Nocturne, the book is more overtly erotic than any other fiction I’ve written so far, and that’s fun, especially when you’re talking about shapeshifters. Well, you can imagine...

You’ve said that you delved into the occult as a teenager. Would you tell me a bit more about that and whether your experiences back then have influenced your work now?

First of all, I grew up in Berkeley, and the whole place is supernatural. So there’s that. My father grew up in Mexico City, and is Russian on top of that, so even though he’s a scientist, there’s also a strong sense of magical realism about him, and that’s been an influence. I was always very interested in dreams and synchronicities, the Tarot (California, right?), and when I was sixteen I played around with séances in cemeteries (because it’s not enough just to have a séance or to spend the night in a cemetery, oh, no - you have to have the entire multimedia experience all at once...) and that led to a poltergeist occurrence that I drew on for my first book, THE HARROWING (just released in the UK this month). I also experimented with the Zener cards used in the ESP testing done at the parapsychology lab at Duke University, which is the basis for THE UNSEEN. And I’m addicted to ghost walks, and haunted tours, and I seek out places that have a lot of occurrences reported. So yeah, some of these books I’ve been doing field research for all my life.

Do you believe in ghosts etc?

I find it hard to say simply, “Yes, I believe in ghosts.” But you read and hear enough about psychic and supernatural events experienced by ordinary people, and they’re all so very similar:

- Houses or sites which retain an impression – visual, auditory, or sensory – of a traumatic event that occurred there.

- Crisis apparitions: A loved one is hurt or dying and appear s in some way to a relative or mate at the moment of death, either as a full-fledged apparition or a signal, like a mirror shattering.

- Precognitive dreams: A young mother has a nightmare that her new baby is crushed to death when the light fixture above the crib falls – she wakes up screaming and runs in to the nursery where she finds the baby perfectly fine, sleeping soundly, but she takes the baby into bed with her and her husband – and two hours later they’re awakened by a crash from inside the nursery...

- Visitations from dead loved ones who have something to say about where your mother’s bracelet is or where the new will was filed.

- And of course the ordinary psychic things that happen all the time – the wife who dreams that there is another woman in bed with her and her husband – and discovers that he is, indeed, having an affair. The teenager who decides at the last second to take the left turn instead of the right, even though it will mean an extra five minutes getting to his friend’s house – and as20he makes the turn he hears the screeching of brakes and a grinding of metal back there at that very corner.

All these things can be explained by simple, ordinary perception. But I believe those things happen, and whatever the explanation, I think reality is a lot more mutable than skeptics want to admit. And I’m not just talking about our perceptions and instincts and intuitions. I mean the whole of the universe gives us signs all the time.

You have a fast, crisp and intense style of writing. Which is most difficult, writing a screenplay or a novel?

A novel, by far! You can cheat a lot with a screenplay. With a novel you alone have to deliver every part of the experience. Every single moment of the story, every visual, every character, every emotion, ; has to be accounted for, one way or another, and it all has to be a seamless and mesmerizing whole. While in a film, countless artists are contributing to that seamless, dreamlike whole – the burden isn’t just on the writer.

What filmmakers or novelists influence you?

Oh, so many – I’ll be listing forever. Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Polanski, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Coppola, Kubrick, Cameron Crowe, the Coen brothers, Neil Jordan, Bruce Robinson, Frank Darabont, Brad Anderson.

Novelists: Shirley Jackson, the Brontes, Daphne Du Maurier, Ira Levin, Stephen King, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Shelley, Madeleine L’Engle. Let’s not forget playwrights, either: Shakespeare, Shaw, Lillian Hellman, Claire Booth Luce, Tom Stoppard, Rogers and Hammerstein… and musicians… and artists…

I’m leaving out about a million indispensible influence.

How many hours a day do you spend writing?

Pretty much a full business day, 8-4. Some days every waking hour (and dreaming hour, too). Unfortunately not all of that is writing, though – there’s so much business involved in the business of writing. Every day is at least a couple hours of that, and after a book comes out, of course, you can have full days and weeks of just promotion, it’s grueling.

Give me five words which best describe Alexandra Sokoloff?

Chameleon, gypsy, feminist, empath, witch.

Visit her at www.alexandrasokoloff.com