Some Thoughts on the Origins of The Night Battles

I began this novel on my return to the US after three years in Sicily. Life lived away from one’s own culture is sharper, stranger; it’s an effect that has always served a writer’s impulse well. While in Sicily two things happened that sparked the idea for this book: I came into possession of a copy of Carlo Ginsburg’s stunning work The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; and I visited the town of Salemi, where a consortium of civic leaders and local academics were attempting to market their town’s cultural history to foreign scholars and tourists. Their recently-opened archives contained municipal records that had been stored in the floors of the nearby rocca and, if I remember correctly, had in fact come to light in an earthquake.

So I began with a question: What would happen if the inhabitants of an isolated Sicilian hilltown, believing themselves still locked in an ancient, paranormal conflict between good and evil, attempted to market their town to the larger world?

A fondness for unconventional female protagonists—Smilla Jaspersen in Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Ellen Ripley in Ridley Scott’s Alien trilogy—led me to create the character of Joan, a combative, damaged, brilliant woman whose history gives her an instinctive grasp of the strange phenomena around her and a powerful susceptibility to it. She comes under its influence, ultimately, in the form of the archivist Cosimo Chiesa, a man haunted by his inability to enter the modern world; he longs to live in a place empty of spirits.

At some point the book declared itself a novel of psychological suspense, and I found that an extremely close first person point of view—one that placed the reader entirely in Joan’s disturbed, hyper-intuitive mind—gave the book a dark, floating, dreamlike ambiguity that served this purpose well.

Finally, I wrote this book as if it were a very long dream. It’s an accretion of “day residue”—images and fragments of information encountered by chance that found their way, reimagined and resignified, into the work. I came across a book of Letizia Battaglia’s photographs of Sicily, and Simona Origo came to life; a review of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons seized my imagination and led me to de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. If writing is the long, conscious and unconscious working-out of the deep themes of human life, then this seems just as it should be.