Reimagining Disappeared Worlds: Nova Ren Suma on the Allure of Writing Lost Places

One of my earliest memories is watching a house burn down with a man still inside it.

My young mother stood with me in my nightgown at the edge of our driveway while across the street, the house where the old man lived was engulfed in flames. The shock of sirens had woken us in the night. My father was sleeping in the storeroom in the city where he worked, only upstate with us on weekends, so it was my mother and me who witnessed this destruction alone.

The flames roared and the air roasted, and I saw the hot bright wind in my mother’s long hair and felt it in my own. At least, that’s how I remember it.

We watched as firemen went in and the man was carried out. He didn’t survive. I don’t know his name—my mother said he was kind; he used to come over and chop wood for us in the winter. But his house was gone and I watched it go. I understood then that a place can get swallowed in the night and take you with it.

After that, some other house must have been built in its place, but I’ve crossed it out of existence in every memory I have of that road. In the map of my childhood, nothing exists there anymore. That was the first time I discovered that a place—and a person—could be lost forever in a frantic instant.

One of my early books features a town drowned in order to build a reservoir, based on a village that once existed at the bottom of the local reservoir where as a teen I’d sneak in to skinny-dip. In another novel, I haunted a girls’ juvenile detention center, long closed down and now boarded-up, imagining the graffiti-strewn walls based on old buildings where I’ve trespassed and left my mark.

In still another novel there was a defunct summer camp that I used to pass on a winding backroad, seeing peeks of rickety outhouses and sunken cabins that promised something sinister. These were, or had been, tangible places. These were places that could be found on maps and have remained in some form as skeletons of themselves, echoes.

But lost places that catch our collective interest are often ones that can’t be found at all. Sometimes these are places where people lose themselves never to be seen again, where the unexplained keeps occurring and we’re left to make some kind of sense of it. Places lost to time, lost to sailors and explorers, lost to living memory.

There is of course the Bermuda Triangle where planes and ships lose communication and disappear, or lesser-known places, such as the Bridgewater Triangle in the forests of Vermont where a quick succession of people went missing and other strange phenomena are witnessed. There are abandoned islands where civilizations once thrived like Easter Island, mythic islands lost at sea like Atlantis, cities of gold never to be found like El Dorado, and whole continents sunk in the deep of the Indian Ocean like Lemuria.

Lost places fascinate me. What is fact and what is fantasy tangle in my mind, which is a glint of pleasing possibility for any fiction writer.

But many of these legends have unhappy endings and frightening underbellies, and I didn’t want to write a horror story this time. I had it in mind to write about a place you’d want to find…because the world outside is the horror.

This novel became Wake the Wild Creatures, a coming-of-age story about a girl who is captured from a community of fugitive women hidden in the forest and is trying to find her way back home. The lost place here—her home—is an abandoned hotel at the top of an unnamed mountain in the Catskills, somehow so concealed the community is protected from those who mean to do them harm. Until, of course, the night it all goes wrong.

The hotel may be an invention, but it’s one infused and inspired by a particular place that did exist, a lost place that once stood near where I grew up. At some point I found an old black-and-white photograph of this particular hotel in an online archive, a relic. The photograph shows a palatial white structure spreading out over a thick forest of firs. A dark gray mass of trees, a paler stretch of blank sky.

I couldn’t imagine being a guest there. The idea seemed ludicrous to me—such opulence on that steep and rugged slope, separated from all the people, like my family and me, who lived below. And what tugged at me was the idea of what came after, once this hulking mass of a hotel was overtaken by the forest and no one knew its name anymore.

The lost hotel I’d found was called the Grand Hotel, and it was built by the Ulster and Delaware Railroad in 1881, which erected a line up the slope only to reach it. When that section of the railroad stopped running in 1966, the Grand Hotel closed its doors.

There were many parcels of history and details of interest sparked from other sources that found their way into my book—I had the whole Borscht Belt of hotels to borrow from—but I was struck by the vision of that particular hotel. I saw the crumbling ruins on a mountain peak, and I saw what might come when it finds a new purpose.

After finishing the book, I’ve since wondered about the actual place once named the Grand Hotel and what became of it. What I’ve heard is that there are organized hikes leading to the mountaintop, and that nothing remains anymore but the expansive, picturesque view.

In my admittedly overactive imagination, the hotel must have been carted down, piece by piece, door by door, chandelier by chandelier, on the final run of the train. Maybe it disappeared completely, every last brick, and only old photographs and fantastical stories like mine remain.

In my book I’ve imagined another end and a new beginning. There, it’s the broken society below the mountain and the authorities in the world outside that are the true danger, and the shuttered and forgotten place is the refuge worth protecting.

I couldn’t have guessed how prescient that would feel, years after I was locked away in my house working endlessly on this book, and especially now, today. When I invented a place that refused to be swallowed forever the night it all goes wrong, I couldn’t have known it would bring a kind of healing to a wound I didn’t know I still carried.

This is the place that I wrote, a place lost but meant to be found.

______________________________

Wake the Wild Creatures by Nova Ren Suma is available via Little Brown YA.