The Myth of Lightning: Or, How My “Morbid Curiosity” Led to My Most Recent Novel
Author Karen White shares how the “morbid curiosity” she received from her father has led to many of her novels, including her most recent.
Contrary to popular opinion, and despite being the author of many books that contain either overt or subtle supernatural touches, I myself have no psychic abilities. Or at least I don’t think I do. I’ve met self-professed psychics who tell me that I do, which is why I feel compelled to write about—at least peripherally—supernatural subjects, and that I do a really good job of hiding my so-called abilities. Probably because I’m such a scaredy-cat.
I had the good fortune to be raised by a father who shared with me what my mother referred to as his “morbid curiosity.” He was an avid reader, almost exclusively nonfiction, and he found the real world as fascinating and unpredictable as our imaginations. I think the reason why I always had a story going on in my head or how my favorite question was always “what if” was because of him. His endless curiosity brought us to visit places like Stonehenge, the Lizzie Borden house, the Gettysburg battlefield, and a trip to DC to see the supposedly cursed Hope diamond.
It’s no surprise to my family and friends that I always seek out the weird and the unusual and the kinds of things that despite them being absolutely true are actually stranger than fiction. (Which, by the way, was the title of one of the books my dad would read to me as a small child and was also the singular reason why I was afraid to sleep in my own bed at night.) This unwholesome interest is how the idea germ for That Last Carolina Summer sprouted during one of my sessions of procasta-scrolling through the Internet.
Both of my parents were from Mississippi and every summer I would spend a few weeks with my maternal grandparents and assorted cousins. Mississippi experiences frequent thunderstorms and ensuing lightning strikes in the hot summer months because of its location in the warm, moist air mass of the Gulf Coast region. My grandmother lived in a tiny house with a metal roof, and during those almost daily storms, the rattling boom of the thunder would shake pictures from the walls while the blue-white lightning lit up the night. My grandmother would try to calm me by saying it was the angels bowling in heaven, but I never really bought into that. I’m still not a fan of lightning storms and the havoc they can wreak.
Which is probably why during an Internet scroll I latched on to a story about people getting struck by lightning and suddenly claiming to have premonition. This outcome is hotly debated by experts, but as a writer of fiction, it didn’t matter if it was true or not. What mattered to me was that if people had claimed it enough times that it could be true.
Being a writer, my imagination began to spin. What if a child was born without any supernatural power but acquired it after a catastrophic event? And what if the child was old enough to know that her new gift made her stand out as being different? And maybe for a while standing out was a good thing because it made her the center of attention when before she had hidden in the shadows created by the brightness of a beautiful older sister. But what would happen when the gift shows her something dark and foreboding in a relentless dream that follows her night after night until she flees across the country to escape it?
And that is how the story of Phoebe Manigault begins. Set against the luscious backdrop of the South Carolina low country where storms seem so much closer to the ground because of the flat and watery landscape, I pictured the terrifying opening storm scene for Phoebe at age nine where she is crabbing off the deck behind her house and is struck by lightning. She is left with a jagged scar on her back and the ability to see the future in her dreams.
Her premonitions are always about people she recognizes and occur before the event itself. But there’s one lingering dream where she doesn’t recognize any of the participants, and she doesn’t know if it’s something that has already happened or something that will happen. It’s a dark and disturbing chain of events and it haunts her almost nightly into early adulthood. It is one of the reasons why she fleas to the West Coast, where she finds the dream and her gift become dormant. It also puts needed space between Phoebe and her sister and mother. She thrives in her new Oregon home until she is summoned home again by her sister saying their mother is ill and she needs Phoebe to come home.
Reluctantly, Phoebe returns to South Carolina, and the dream returns with her. Except now every time she has the dream, a little more information is revealed, each bit opening up a Pandora’s box into her family’s past until it is thrown wide open, revealing a dark secret that was meant to stay buried.
As a child I used to wish I could see into the future. What kind of a career would I have? Would I get married? How many children would I have? Would I be happy? As I grew older, I began to see that knowing the future might not be the gift I’d once imagined. Because a positive outcome isn’t guaranteed, nor can mere knowledge alter the future. While creating Phoebe’s character, I tried to envision what it would be like for her to be able to see an approaching disaster, but be powerless to stop it or give warning.
Do I still want to see the future? I don’t know the answer. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book—to explore the possibilities. Through Phoebe, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to be gifted the knowledge of foresight, and if it would be considered a gift or a curse. Or maybe a little bit of both. And what I might do with the knowledge.
That Last Carolina Summer is primarily a story about the bond between sisters, mothers and daughters that begins with a single strike of lightning that informs and illuminates the characters’ life choices and shines a spotlight on the difficult path toward forgiveness.
Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Tradd Street series, Dreams of Falling, The Night the Lights Went Out, Flight Patterns, The Sound of Glass, A Long Time Gone, and The Time Between. She is the co-author of The Forgotten Room and The Glass Ocean with New York Times bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Ga.