Meet author Kate van der Borgh
And He Shall Appear is a new novel featuring the occult, class rivalry and Elizabethan alchemy
This week on IF YOU GO AWAY I interview Kate van der Borgh, author of And He Shall Appear, plus share my first article for Plymouth Live, the main online news source for our city, and review Ghost Stories.
I’m P M Buchan, a former comic-book writer and lover of horror and dark art. I’ve written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and SCREAM: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement.
An interview with Kate van der Borgh
Kate van der Borgh is an award-winning copywriter and author of And He Shall Appear, a novel featuring the occult, class rivalry and Elizabethan alchemy that sits alongside the increasingly popular Dark Academia genre and has echoes of classic English ghost stories of the kind associated with M R James.
I first became aware of Kate’s work in December 2024, when rave reviews for And He Shall Appear began popping up in magazines and journals that I was reading. Soon after that, I spotted a friend recommending the debut novel of his sister, which turned out to be Kate. This connection felt like the perfect opportunity to find out more about a kindred spirit who’ professes to being drawn to the sad and supernatural.
Can you tell me a little about your creative background, thinking specifically about how long you've been writing creatively, your passion for music and how the different strands of your interests complement each other?
Well, I guess music and literature have been the big creative forces in my life. On the music side: as a kid I played piano, clarinet, saxophone amongst other things, and forced my parents to sit through many painful end-of-term concerts. Later, I took up the bassoon, simply because our school had a spare one and I was the only pupil with a big enough handspan to cover the keys. This turned out to be useful in later years because, since bassoonists are relatively rare, I was always in demand as an instrumentalist (in the same way, I guess, that bands are never stuck for guitarists but are always desperate for a good drummer). My whole childhood was spent in rehearsal rooms, so it was kind of inevitable that I'd study music at university. In the end, I went to Cambridge, so the course was all about classical music and was quite heavy on the history and theory. But my Discman usually had something like System of a Down inside it.
At the same time, I always loved reading and writing. In fact, I probably would have loved to study something like English, but I didn't even consider it at the time. I had always been The Musical Kid, and that seemed to be my 'thing'. After uni, I did a lot of singing. First in jazz bands, then later in a kind of alternative/rock/metal band whose influences included Oceansize, Dredg, Muse, Faith No More... But in those Band Years, I was very slowly becoming a professional writer. I'd started out in PR and realised I was terrible at it, and found my way into the copywriting world, which is where I've been for many years now. And, somehow, once I started to write full time, the music stuff fell away a bit. Perhaps I felt like the writing was scratching the creative itch - I don't know. I still love music, but I don't feel the need to perform like I used to.
The question of how the two interests complement each other is a good one, because I suppose you can think about it either off or on the page. Off the page: both disciplines definitely build stamina. As a teenage pianist, I would think nothing of practising the same four bars for about an hour... And writing a novel, I have to be prepared to edit a scene over and over again, which can be really quite dull. And on the page, I definitely love to write about music: the experience of playing it, of hearing it. It's a big part of And He Shall Appear, actually - the narrator is (like my younger self) someone from a Northern town studying music at Cambridge, and music is what binds him to an enchanting but unsettling friend. It's a fun challenge, trying to put a musical experience into words.
What first motivated you to begin writing creatively and have your motivations changed over time? How does the writing you're doing now compare to the ideas you had when you first started writing prose?
You know what, that's a really difficult question. Because I can't really remember a time when it wasn't normal for me to be writing or creating something. I wrote stories as a kid - the earliest one I can remember is a sequel to The Lion King, typed out on my parents' BBC computer, which opened with a fairly grisly death scene as I recall. (God, I loved sitting at that big green screen.) Like I say, there were times when music took over as the major creative force, before writing reasserted itself again.
For a long time, I found it much easier to write according to someone else's brief - both in and out of my day job. I was a member of a writers' group, and I'd take part in their projects - for instance, different writers would be tasked with writing about different locations, or we'd each write a piece of fiction inspired by a different object. It was a nice way to keep up with creative writing, even when I didn't feel like I had enough of my own ideas to get me going. But there came a point when I started to think: hang on, why are you always working on other people's projects? What project do you want to work on? This was also about the time that I'd started to read ghost stories again (an old interest of mine that I'd neglected in order to focus on things I felt I 'should' have been reading) and I think this was probably the point at which I started to write my own spooky stuff. Ultimately, writing the novel meant writing about things I really cared about, putting a lot of my own thoughts and experience onto the pages. (Which is why, even though the novel is about a lad who thinks his best mate might be the devil, even though it's full of odd magic and ghostly things, on some level I think of it as a true story).
These days, I've got a clearer idea of what it is I like to write about. Basically: ghosts, music. Also, The North, since I'm from Burnley in Lancashire. On that, I heard a funny thing lately. I'm doing an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, and one of the writers in my workshop group (who is from the US) said that my writing is “more British than any of the other British writers in the group”. I think it's because my settings are very ordinary, like the betting shop or The Big Tesco. Anyway, I take it as a compliment.
Can you name some of your inspirations, from any medium, and explain how you connected with them or what it is that speaks to you and makes you want to create your own art?
I'll always look back fondly on those things that terrified me as a kid: Watership Down, Labyrinth, Return to Oz; the Point Horror books. Perhaps I felt attracted to these because I was lucky enough to have a very safe and secure childhood. I was free to dip into these weird and terrifying worlds, knowing that I could step straight back out of them, and being scared was just a pure thrill ride. Like being on a rollercoaster. And what an achievement it is, to write something that stays with a reader (or viewer) throughout their lives! As I say, I'm also inspired by The North - both the wild and mystical rural landscapes that feel a million miles from my home in London, and also the old ex-industrial towns that take me back to my childhood. It's probably because I've had complex feelings about the place where I grew up. As a teenager I couldn't wait to get away, but now I find myself pulling back. Time and place are tied so tightly together, and writing about the North allows me to try and unpick some of those knotty feelings about identity, memory, the past.
Thinking a bit more broadly, I also find it massively inspiring whenever I see someone living their passion. The first example that comes to mind is the ballet dancer Marianela Nuñez who is one of the Principals at the Royal Ballet. She clearly loves dance with every fibre of her being and has devoted her life to it, and so she has the most incredible combination of passion and craft. When you watch her dance, you can feel her joy in every movement. (Her Desert Island Discs is worth a listen.) Same goes for great classical musicians, like the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli or the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. When I see these individuals who have devoted so much of themselves to their art and reached such a high level, I'm amazed at what it's possible for ordinary human beings to do. it just makes me want to read more, to write more, to switch off from bloody social media and go and do something useful.
How far does your interest in horror and dark art extend? Can you name anything that particularly resonates for you or what you dislike and why you draw the line there?
Ha, yes, when I was nine or ten, I'd take my dad to our local Blockbuster Video so that he could rent stuff like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street for me. Whenever my parents were questioned about the wisdom of this, they'd say that I was “intelligent enough to know the difference between fiction and reality”, not realising that I spent every bedtime absolutely bricking it that Freddie Krueger was coming to get me. But the one that really did me in was the BBC's Ghostwatch. I was one of those who watched it live on Halloween night 1992, and I don't think I'd ever been so profoundly frightened in my entire life. I believed the whole thing and couldn't sleep in my own room for days.
As I got older, I found that I liked the quiet, supernatural stuff (more than slashers, or monsters, or aliens or whatever). So yes, the ghost stories of M R James and Edith Wharton. And, thinking of novels, Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, or The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (which I think is probably the great ghost novel of our times). I also have a fondness for stories which - like Ghostwatch, I guess - take place in a very ordinary domestic setting. After all, I can avoid the ghosts of Gothic castles simply by avoiding Gothic castles, but what am I supposed to do if something starts crawling out of my own TV?? I watched Skinamarink recently, thinking that it probably wouldn't be my cup of tea, and I actually felt I was going to have a heart attack. It did me in. I'm not hugely into gory stuff. Not because I have any particular objections to it, but because it just doesn't stay with me. I like the stuff that whirls round my head when I'm trying to sleep.
Really, my favourite horror of all is the stuff that touches on the existential terror of being alive! For instance, I adore Lake Mungo, the 2008 mockumentary by Joel Anderson. Yes, throughout the film there's the basic question of whether the central family is being haunted or not. But added to this is the terror of the people we love being always out of reach, the feeling that we can't ever know them completely. It makes the whole thing not just scary but sad too - which, for me, is exactly what the best horror should be. I thought a lot about that when I was writing And He Shall Appear, which is definitely meant to be as sad as it is scary.
If budget and audience weren't limiting factors, and you had the freedom to create anything, in any medium, what would you make and why?
To be honest, I'd quite like to just write another book! I'm planning to do that anyway, but the writing will have to fit around other things, like copywriting projects, general life admin. I'd love to know what it's like to have enough resources that you can dedicate every last bit of brain space to a creative project. I'm thinking now of those Victorian gentleman writers who never had to think about things like doing the laundry or cooking the dinner or ordering the dog worming tablets...
At the same time, I wonder if limitations are a useful part of the creative process. I don't see the audience as a limiting factor, since I don't write what I think other people want to read - I write what I myself would like to read. But when it comes to budget, or format, perhaps it's quite useful to have something to push against. Nick Asbury, a writer friend of mine, spent several years writing a poem a day, giving himself only a few minutes each morning to produce the finished piece. And the writers' group 26 often runs creative writing projects which involve writing sestudes: defined as 'reflective studies in 62 words'. I feel like having no limitations might send me a bit mad. Maybe give me the worst possible case of blank page syndrome.
Then again, there's part of me that would love to go big and turn And He Shall Appear into an opera...! I know opera isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for me it's a bit like Shakespeare, it's a language of its own, so can feel a bit alienating at first, but once you get attuned to it it's loads of fun. I love the ambition and scale of it: you get ripping plots, incredible music, extraordinary singers, spectacular staging... all at once. And styles have changed so much over the centuries that I reckon most people would be able to find something to appreciate within its history.
Opera is full of ghosts anyway (Mozart's Don Giovanni ends with the protagonist being dragged to Hell by a haunted statue, Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw is a genuinely creepy interpretation of Henry James' story - there's even a 2015 opera of The Shining). So I reckon there's room for one more. I can absolutely imagine some of the scenes from the book appearing on stage, as they're designed to be quite theatrical anyway. Bryn, the antagonist, is a magician and is always performing for his friends, and I think some of those moments would translate pretty well.
Although I'd read about your debut in national newspapers, we're speaking because I spotted that you're related to a friend who’s one of the most successful Creative Directors in the county, and also an incredibly talented comic-book creator. Was there something in the water where you were growing up or did your parents have a secret to raising children to become successfully creative adults?
Ha, yes. My brother is Matt Baxter, Creative Director of Baxter and Bailey and comic book whizz. He was always very into art and design, even as a kid. My dad tells a great story from before I was born, of the family house where the carpet had a repeating pattern of flowers on it, and Matt (aged about six?) drew an extra flower on the weave. The thing is, though, Matt's flower was such a good copy of the real ones that it took ages for anyone to notice that the pattern was wrong.
I can't say why Matt and I have ended up doing what we're doing. But - as obvious as it sounds - I know we were very lucky to have parents who thoroughly supported our creative interests. My dad has talked about going round comic shops with Matt at weekends, and I remember the hours my parents spent driving me to and from music lessons. My mum always said that the one thing she'd never refuse me if I asked was a book. And she didn't mind me hammering away on the piano, even when my playing was drowning out the telly.
All of which meant that Matt and I were allowed to spend loads of time on our hobbies. And the more time you spend, the more you improve, and the more inspired you feel by what you're doing. Anyway, I don't really know the answer, but I know we were lucky.
More Ghost Stories
Last week I wrote my first article for Plymouth Live, the online version of the Plymouth Herald, our local newspaper. I’ve been writing sporadically for Cornwall Live about horror and related dark art events in the region for the past year or so, but it’s particularly exciting for me to have a platform to write about events that are taking place a little closer to home.
Plymouth Live – Plymouth is crying out for more Ghost Stories
When I was a regular columnist for magazines like Starburst and SCREAM, there were always invites to press screenings, openings and launches. Unfortunately, I was also raising a family with some pretty intense needs at the time, was working a full time job and doing freelance PR by nights to stay afloat, and was far from any kind of support network, so I can count on one hand the number of invitations that I was able to accept.
Now that my children are teenagers and need me less on the evenings and weekends, or in some cases will even concede to come to events with me (!), I’m in a much better place to go to events, but there isn’t a lot for lovers of horror and dark art in the South West of England. Whenever I have capacity, I’m trying to attend and support any events that fit the bill, and find platforms to shout about them to show some love and hopefully make it easier for audiences to find similar events in future.
My first article for Plymouth Live features a mini-review of Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories, which we watched recently at Theatre Royal Plymouth and absolutely loved. I wouldn’t describe it as particularly frightening, but there were some definite jump scares, spooky makeup and costumes, cool puppetry and a general vibe that made for a great experience. From the moment we arrived at the theatre I knew that I would have a good time and more than that, felt like everybody involved understood what had motivated me to buy a ticket and actively wanted me to be entertained.
Jeremy Dyson, one of the UK’s League of Gentlemen, is obviously a macabre genius. The League of Gentlemen has been close to my heart for almost as long as I can remember, and was filmed in the village where my wife grew up (explaining a lot…). You probably saw Andy Nyman most recently in Wicked (2024), but I always remember him for his performance in Black Death (2010), the brutally dark medieval horror directed by Christopher Smith.
Smith was responsible for Triangle (2009), one of the darkest time loop films ever made. Between those two films, I’d say he directed two of the most interesting, subversive horrors of the century to date, though interestingly I hated his first film, Creep (2004), which I remember as being relentlessly nasty without a single character to empathise with or care whether they lived or died. Not sure whether I’d still feel that way if I watched it again.
I digress. Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman created in Ghost Stories an enduring horror theatrical experience and I would thoroughly recommend going to see it live if you get the chance.
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