Inspiration behind The Star and the Strange Moon

Inspiration behind The Star and the Strange Moon

My third book, The Star and the Strange Moon, is out November 14th.  I’d admit my books are a little strange. They’ve got trippy little plots—whether a witch is reincarnated again and again or a circus set in Hell, one of the most common questions I get, is “Where on earth do you come up with these ideas?”  The truthful answer is that I don’t know where the ideas come from.  Images circle in my head for a while and then snap together rather quickly.  My third book is no exception. It’s been described as “a haunting tale of ambition, obsession and the eternal mystery and magic of film.”

By the way of theme, this book felt bigger than the two.  I often felt I was stumbling around in the dark on this book, so I decided to explore my process to see how I wrestled with this book from the very beginning to get it on the page.

After my second book was accepted into publication, I was facing a looming and scary deadline for book three. I recall telling my agent that I was working on “The Jack Pickford Project.”  Old Hollywood is a period that I just can’t shake and Jack Pickford, the brother of “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, had a rather tragic story.  The lives of the stars of early Hollywood were so controlled by the studios and fixers that mystery surrounds the deaths of people like Olive Thomas (Pickford’s wife), William Desmond Taylor, and Thelma Todd. And with so much lost to history, the gaps are filled with rumor and legend.  (In my experience, rumor and legend make great fantasy novels!)  That period in Hollywood was also the very genesis of film.  As a result, there is a kind of lore around the medium itself.  Throughout history, many people were superstitious that photos could “steal your soul” Film creates “magic” but is the actual act of filming magic?   This idea was swirling around in my head and a major theme began to form: Could a film steal your soul?   

The mystery of film—a theme that had me excited about this book, but I still didn’t have characters or a plot.  While I was in Paris doing research, I came across a photo of a striking redhaired actress named Françoise Dorléac.  I wrote her name down with a plan to come back to her later, but found I was haunted by her photo.  Some quick research told a rather tragic story: The older sister of Catherine Deneuve, Dorléac was killed in a car accident in 1967 as she rushed to get to the airport in Nice.  She was twenty-five. On screen the actress is mesmerizing. The muse of François Truffaut, her performance as a flight attendant who gets caught up in an affair with a married man in The Soft Skin elevates the entire film.  She also pairs up with her sister (and Gene Kelly) in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort which is a film a bit thin on plot, but so visually striking it’s like Technicolor eye candy.  When I began to think of my main character, I always pictured Françoise Dorléac’s face as though I’d cast in the role of Gemma Turner.  I hope my book honors her memory and people check out her work.  She was a magnificent actress and she breathed life into my character, Gemma Turner. 

Dorleac’s story also opened an entire door for me in filmmaking history: the influential period in French film known as La Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave). There aren’t a lot of novels set in this period and it felt like a fresh place to start, so moved the time from the 1930s to the 1960s. The movement began in the late 1950s and was influenced by the lack of films available in France during WW2. Directors like Truffaut (The 400 Blows and Kill the Piano Player) and Jean-Luc Goddard (Breathless) experimented with dramatic new approaches with a desire to get closer to human emotion, something they felt had been lost in cinema.  Cinematographers like Raoul Coutard elevated their craft with techniques like jump cuts and long takes.  They also pushed equipment improvements like the Arriflex video camera (which has a starring role in the novel) which was one of the first models to combine sound with the video a feature that would be key to hand-held shots.

At the same time, gothic horror films were growing in popularity.  In the U.S., the Dark Shadows soap opera and companion films began in 1966, making a cult star of the vampire Barnabas Collins.  In England, a production studio known as Hammer Films introduced audiences to actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing who became stars with their portrayals of Dracula and Doctor Van Helsing.  With few exceptions, women in Hammer films are bursting from their corsets and often pawns or victims of vampires, but these films are campy and delightfully strange. Gothic was the rage in the 1960s and This idea this type of setting began to have a great influence on the shaping of the novel as did reading a bunch of Victoria Holt novels.  Novelist Grady Hendrix wrote a non-fiction take on the gothic novels of the 1970s in Paperbacks from Hell which featured a variation of cover art that he called “Women Running from Houses.”  I felt like this was the perfect type of film a French New Wave filmmaker might want to re-shape into a more serious work of art, so I started there.  I love pushing on this gothic horror film theme and an actress who finds herself thrust into one, knowing all the conventions of the trope. 

Immediately, the pieces of the novel began to form:  It’s 1968 and Gemma Turner was once a famous actress, but she’s let her Hollywood career fall away to become the girlfriend of a famous guitarist, Charlie Hicks.  Now, work offers have dried up.  She gets one last chance when she gets a call from a French New Wave film director, Thierry Valdon, who is making a gothic vampire horror film, L’Etrange Lune.  Gemma is thrilled to work again and the idea of working with a New Wave film director is exciting. Once on the set, however, her dream job becomes a nightmare—Valdon is a temperamental nightmare to work with and the film’s script is laughable. On a night shoot, she’s filming a scene when she finds she’s been transported inside the film. Surrounded by the characters from L’Etrange Lune, she knows the script—and its ending—and she needs to play her part and outwit the mysterious “director” to stay alive and get herself back home again.  

Finally, I wanted a modern-day character to frame the book, so I created a character who is a documentary filmmaker named Christopher Kent.  I like the back and forth play between dual narratives, and I wanted a character to push this mystery forward.  In the first chapter, Christopher discovers he has a jarring connection to Gemma Turner, the actress who disappeared nearly fifty years ago on the set of her film and was never seen again. This connection propels him over twenty years to solve the mystery of her disappearance.  With the addition of Christopher’s character, I had the final piece of my novel in place.  And, as I had lost my mother while writing the novel, I found Christopher’s voice became my own and I had wrangled an idea into a final manuscript.

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Constance Sayers is the author of two best-selling novels: A Witch in Time (Hachette, 2020) and The Ladies of the Secret Circus (Hachette, 2021), the latter receiving both a Publishers Weekly and Library Journal starred reviews.  Her work has been translated into six languages and her third novel, The Star and the Strange Moon will be published by Hachette on 11.14.23.  She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

She received an MA in English from George Mason University and a B.A. in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She splits her time between Alexandria, Virginia and West Palm Beach, Florida.  You can find her at:  www.constancesayers.com and @constancesayers on Instagram.

THE STAR AND THE STRANGE MOON

From the author of A Witch in Time comes a haunting tale of ambition, obsession, and the eternal mystery and magic of film.  

A vanished star. A haunted film. A mystery only love can unravel…

1968: Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Now the actress is on the cusp of obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has changed—but her dream is about to turn into a nightmare. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is alive. She’s been pulled into the film. And the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. Gemma must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.

2007: Gemma Turner’s disappearance is one of Hollywood’s greatest mysteries—one that’s captivated film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw L’Étrange Lune for the first time. The screenings only happen once a decade and each time there is new, impossible footage of Gemma that shouldn’t exist. Curiosity drives Christopher to unravel the truth. But answers to the film’s mystery may leave him trapped by it forever.

“A sweeping tale of dark magic, artistic obsession, and a love unbound from the limits of time, The Star and the Strange Moon captivates with lush prose and moments of poignant, heartbreaking beauty.” —Paulette Kennedy, author of The Witch of Tin Mountain 

BUY HERE

For more from Constance Sayers, check out:
A Witch in Time
The Ladies of the Secret Circus

 

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing