Elizabeth Broadbent interviews Del Sandeen, author of “This Cursed House”

Del Sandeen’s This Cursed House (Berkley 2024) begins in 1962, Jemma Barker escapes her life in Chicago with a job offer from the well-to-do Duchon family in New Orleans. Pale enough to pass for white, the Black Duchons look down on darker-skinned Jemma, and the job she came to do doesn’t seem to exist. As she becomes more and more entangled in their family, their secrets begin to unravel. She might be tied to them. And she might have to get out.

The book pulls all the Southern Gothic punches. Replete with family secrets, lost letters, claustrophobic settings, hereditary curses, and that deep sense of rot beneath a veneer of beauty, the novel hits the mark of high gothic more than most contemporary releases. “I did have someone ask me, You threw in almost every trope,” Sandeen said, laughing. “And I said, yeah, because I don’t know that I’m ever going to be able to write another book!”

But Sandeen was wrong about that. Not only has This Cursed House enjoyed rave reviews from places like Esquire, her next book, These Walls Remember, comes out with Random House in August.

Elizabeth Broadbent: First, where did this novel come from? What were your inspirations?

Del Sandeen: Let’s see. I guess I had a couple. One of them was the film Eve’s Bayou by Casey Lemons. It came out in the mid-90s. You should watch it wherever you can find it streaming … that move was about a Black family who lived in the Louisiana bayou in the early 1960s. The dad is a doctor. They’re rich, they’re very beautiful. So externally, they look like the perfect family. But once you get to know them, you see that there’s a lot a drama going on. And I liked that—something looking one way but actually being something else.

Del Sandeen

Then the colorism part. The main thing that inspired that was something that happened to my dad’s mother, my paternal grandmother. She was born in the 1920s in South Carolina, when this country was still very segregated, at least down South. And she grew up in the country, and went to a very rural, all-black school. And because, you know, it’s a poor school, they don’t have a lot of resources. So when it was time for the girls to use the sewing machines, they didn’t have enough machines for everyone to use at the same time.

The girls were supposed to take turns. And what happened was the teacher was a very light-skinned woman, and she favored the light-skinned girls in the class. And my grandmother, she was brown-skinned, And because that’s how the teacher did things, she just let the light-skinned girls use the sewing machines, and the brown-skinned girls just had to sit by and watch.

So that was very personal, family history. But I think a lot of Black Americans—either they’ve had an experience or they know someone or they’ve seen it. It’s just one of those things. And it’s not just in the Black community … the lighter the skin, they’re perceived as more beautiful, perceived as smarter, just more positive attributes in general.

To me, that’s one of the horrors. It’s insidious and it’s so divisive.

EB: So what was your writing process like through this?

 DS: This Cursed House was like, the sixth and a half manuscript I finished. I say half because I did a novella that hasn’t been published. So even though it was like the sixth and a half, this is the first one published. My writing process has improved through the years because the first novel I wrote it took me, I think, six years to finish it.

I do work chronologically. It’s hard for me to write out of order. Every now and then I get stuck. I know what A is and I know what C is, but I don’t know what B is. I have a hard time moving ahead to C.

EB: How did you do the historical research for the novel?

 Sandeen: I had family members who grew up in the Civil Rights Era and before, and they talked to me a lot when I was growing up, just telling me stories here and there. I guess I always remembered them, because when I sat down to write, I’d remember—oh, you know, so-and-so said this, or my dad told me this. A rhythm Gemma thought about, If you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re brown, stick around, if you’re Black, stay back, he said that was something he heard growing up in his neighborhood. My dad was born in 1947, and he grew up in Florida. Before the Black Power Movement happened, where Black people were wearing natural hair and all, no one wanted to be called Black.

And I had been to New Orleans a couple of times. I loved it there, and I read a lot of Anne Rice. And that helped. But I also found a YouTube video that someone recorded of a 1963 Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. But even though I visited New Orleans, I didn’t know a lot about it. So I did have to look into what was going on in the city in the early 60s. I kept the details pretty minor—I felt they were minor enough to set the place, like the name of the mayor. The fact that they were protesting because they were only letting Black people work certain jobs in certain areas of the city. The neighborhood, Treme—I did a deep dive into that.

When you’re researching history it can get hard because you can fall into a rabbit hole and get lost. You do enough. But you don’t go overboard or the book will never get done.

EB: Who would you say are your influences?

 DS: I can tell you who inspired me—I’m not going to say I write like them. Yeah, in my wildest dreams, maybe. I read a lot of Toni Morrison. Growing up, Octavia Butler. The sad thing for me is that I didn’t discover Octavia Butler until I was older. I really wish I had read her stuff when I was a teenager, because I was reading a lot of sci fi. Alice Walker. Stephen King—you know, as someone who writes in the horror space. I love Zadie Smith, and Tananarive Due.

I grew up reading Stephen King. I did a little bit of Dean Kootz, but there just weren’t a lot of Black horror writers that I was aware of when I was growing up. And I think before Tananarive Due, I found Brandon Massey. I think he’s moved more into suspense and thrillers now. But he was doing horror years ago, and I was just excited to find his work. And findings Due’s, I was just like, oh, this is incredible. But I wish I would have found Butler when I was younger. She can change lives.

EB: So what are you working on now?

 DS: I’m working on what are called first pass proofs of a novel that comes out in August. There are some portions of the book that take place in 1910, but most of it takes place today. There are some supernatural elements, a creepy house, eccentric neighbors … the book is about two estranged sisters who inherit a distant relative’s home. And their plan is to sell the house, take the money, and go their separate ways, because they haven’t talked in years. And once they move into the house, things start happening, and one of the sister’s behavior becomes even stranger. Then the other sister has to figure out how she’s going to save her, and save herself from the house. It’s called These Walls Remember.

 EB: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us and we can’t wait to read your new title, These Walls Remember.