Langley author Jo Macleod calls her novel Heaven Help Us a “modern day ghost story inspired by a true event.”
However she describes it, it’s obviously resonating with local readers.
When Macleod test-marketed it at the Langley Chapters store in March she was told not to expect to sell more than four or five copies.
Instead, she sold 17 – not counting three or four she sold to staff members who came back after their shifts were over.
At Indigo Books in Grandview Corners – where she’ll be doing another signing Saturday, May 7, from 2 to 5:30 p.m. – she placed six copies a couple of weeks ago. When interviewed by Peace Arch News this week, only a couple remained – and the title had graduated from a lower shelf to a featured position in a display of B.C. authors.
There’s a good reason for the connection her first novel is making with readers, she believes – her supernatural tale is not tailored for a market looking for the usual horror-driven frissons.
Rather, it’s for readers who – possibly through their own brushes with unexpected coincidence and inexplicable ‘sixth sense’ impulses – are intrigued by the possibilities of spirits connecting with us from an afterlife.
The Glasgow, Scotland-born Macleod, a former ICBC adjuster, had her own experience of spirit contact some 10 years ago, after she formed an informal weekly meditation circle to help people deal with the stresses of work and life in general.
And that became the inspiration for – but not the substance of – her novel, she said.
Although she has long known she has intuitive – even psychic – ability, she is not a practicing medium and doesn’t pretend to be.
“I’m not trying to convert people about spiritualism, I’m not trying to sell them anything like that – they can take it or leave it,” she said.
In the tale she has woven, a woman from the fictional community of Doune, some 40 miles from Dublin, Ireland (near where Macleod’s own father came from) reaches out, from beyond the grave, to Sophie, an ‘intuitive’ in modern day B.C.
The spirit of the dead woman – she died in 1940 – is concerned that the spirits of her two children, a boy who died under mysterious circumstances and an older girl who disappeared and was never found, are still trapped as ghosts in her old farmhouse.
It’s the prelude to an “emotional roller-coaster” of a story, Macleod said.
Much of Heaven Help Us covers the period of 1895-1911, and features such potent themes as poverty, immigration, child abuse and sociopathy, all informed by research into social conditions in Ireland at the time, but no less significant today, she notes.
It’s a story she felt driven to write by her own personal experience as an ‘intuitive’ – and which also led her to discover her own talents as a storyteller.
It may even result in a follow-up novel continuing some of the story of Heaven Help Us.
“I hadn’t ever thought of writing” she said. “But I discovered it is something I love to do,” she added, noting the process gave her license to articulate emotion.
“I was brought up in Glasgow, where you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve. My family wasn’t emotional, or emotionally expressive.
“When I started writing, it was like a bomb went off.”
