Q&A: Caitlin Starling, Author of ‘The Graceview Patient’

We chat with author Caitlin Starling about The Graceview Patient, which is a genre-bending, claustrophobic hospital gothic.

Hi, Caitlin! Welcome back! How have the past two years been since we last spoke for the release of Last to Leave the Room?

Busier than I planned on! I’ve had two book releases so far this year (The Oblivion Bride with Neon Hemlock and The Starving Saints with Harper Voyager), and now I’m in the thick of launching a third, The Graceview Patient.

Your latest novel, The Graceview Patient, is out October 14^th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Upsettingly unreliably narrated hospital gothic.

What can readers expect?

IV placement minutiae. Meditations (both calm and rageful) on being chronically ill. A sinister white board. Jello. Lots of blurring of what’s real and what’s not.

The Graceview Patient follows Meg’s last ditch attempt to cure the auto-immune condition that’s destroyed much of her life. She signs up for an experimental medical trial, and she thinks she knows what to expect, but the reality of the medication’s side effects (lost time, hallucinations, pain and disorientation) make her begin to question whether she’s suffering for her own sake, or if she’s being haunted through the halls of the hospital she’s confined to. I like to say it’s The Yellow Wallpaper by way of House, MD.

Where did the inspiration for The Graceview Patient come from?

A long term love of doctors’ memoirs, a particularly poignant nurse’s memoir about the first year of the COVID pandemic (Year of the Nurse by Cassandra Alexander), and my own more dramatic than anticipated hospitalization around the birth of my child. I came out of that last experience really wanting to write a book set in a hospital, but without making the care team sinister villains; that meant digging deep to find what felt like a more nuanced story to tell in that setting, which led naturally to styling everything after classic gothic horror.

Take the old manor house with a character all its own, turn it into the hospital itself. The mysterious groundskeeper becomes environmental services staff, the careteam closest to our trapped heroine become the inhabitants of the manor (both staff and the family). Everything falls into place and leaves fun new areas to poke at.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

Meg, our heroine, has several quiet moments with one of her main nurses, Isobel. Writing that relationship (awkward, sometimes tense, sometimes boundary-pushing, often desperate) was a lot of fun, and let me bring some of Meg’s interior life out into the open, where for other people in her life she’s very closed off and on her best behavior. There’s a particular moment where Meg has gone out into a garden on the hospital campus without telling anybody, and finds herself exhausted and unsure if she can get back to her room. Isobel appears as if by magic, and the tension between relief and terror that Isobel could find her so easily was just delicious.

Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?

I am, it turns out, not a medical professional. I am very lucky to know some, though, and my good friend Kathleen went through and did a very detailed review and edit letter identifying and fixing the vast majority of my medical mistakes (anything still in the book is entirely my fault). What could have been simple fact checking actually directed my plot edits as well; we found areas where getting more realistic made the story more nuanced, not just more accurate.

With the spooky season underway, do you have any favourite thrills or chills movies and books your turn to?

I recently saw The Autopsy of Jane Doe for the first time and wow is it made specifically for me! I also recently revisited a Norweigian found footage horror movie, Trollhunter, which is the perfect blend of the detailed mundane and the fantastic.

What’s next for you?

I’m about to start copy edits on a vampire novel that should be coming out next fall. It’s a fun one. Probably my squelchiest book yet.

Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?

I’m so behind on my reading! But I’ve absolutely loved The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman this year, and I’ve got The West Passage by Jared Pechaček beckoning to me from the other side of book launch chaos. I’ve also just finished up Demon Song by Kelsea Yu, which is an awesome Chinese-opera centered horror novella.

Will you be picking up The Graceview Patient? Tell us in the comments below!