When Jane
Jordan was a schoolgirl, she thought it took real inspiration to write a story.
Although she enjoyed reading, her preferences leaned more toward art and
biology. But her fascination with the supernatural was something she couldn’t deny. “I believe growing up in England, a place full of strange folk tales,
haunted castles and ancient graveyards gave me my first inspiration,” she
recalls. Later, she had her own strange experiences and lived in a 500-year-old
thatched cottage that she shared with the ghost of a cat. She also worked in a
1000-year-old castle that had its fair share of supernatural entities. These
experiences would provide the inspiration she needed to become a writer.
Jordan was
born in Essex, a town southeast of London. In 1992, her husband’s job
necessitated a move to Michigan, a few years later she moved to Englewood in
Florida. After nearly fifteen years in America, they returned to England, ans Jordan
was surprised to find it difficult to adjust. “I’d become Americanized,” she
explains. “I felt like a foreigner in England.” During this time, her interest
in biology and love of gardening led her to study horticulture, and she
eventually took a job as a horticulturist for a botanical garden in England. In
2013, she returned to the states, settling in Sarasota. Jordan kept busy
gardening and helping her husband with his business. She also began writing
articles for Florida Gardening Magazine. But a trip to England in 2004 was the
catalyst that sent her life in a new direction.
Jordan and her husband had rented an ancient house in the town of
Exmoor, and she became bewitched by the place. “Something happened that’s hard
to explain,” she recalls. “We were driving down this narrow lane between high
hedgerows when the road suddenly opened up and we were confronted by this
magical house. There was something about it that captured my imagination. I
fell in love with it.” Jordan began researching the house’s history and learned
that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his famous poem “Kubla Khan” there. She
also discovered that the house had some other-worldly residents. “The house had
this haunted feeling about it,” she says. “On the first night, I was in the
bedroom at the dressing table, and the closet door just opened behind me. A few
other weird things happened. The caretaker told me that others had weird
experiences there. All these things set my mind in motion and inspired me to
write a haunted house story.” That story would become her first novel, Raven’s Deep – a dark romance that
combines vampire lore with a modern love story.
Raven’s
Deep spawned a gothic vampire trilogy. The second book, Blood and Ashes, takes the characters from Exmoor to London in a
tale that Jordan calls “a mixture of love, revenge and horror.” The final book,
A Memoir of Carl, tells the story of
a man who, after being bitten by a vampire, allows the love of his life to
believe he is dead rather than expose her to his true nature.
Jordan’s next book, The
Beekeeper’s Daughter, actually started out as her second novel. “I began
writing it years ago, but the other books got in the way,” she says. “When I
got serious about writing, I wanted to write a witchcraft story set in a
different time period.” The Beekeeper’s Daughter tells the story
of a young girl growing up on the English moors in the 1860s who, unbeknownst
to her, possesses special powers inherited from her mother, a beautiful witch. “The
witchcraft element was powerful and intriguing,” Jordan says. “Writing this
book took me on a creative journey with lots of twists and turns.”
Jordan’s fifth novel, Whisht
Hall, is set in a grand house on England’s beautiful and wild Dartmoor. “The
moor is famously remote, filled with great granite outcrops, dense mists, and
dangerous mires,” she says. “In Dartmoor,
granite forms the uplands and the land is capped with many exposed granite
hilltops known as tors. It is a place of
heather moorland, wooded valleys, and meandering rivers.” Dartmoor
has also been an inspirational location for writers. Renowned for mysterious
legends, it inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write his famous Hound of the Baskervilles. “It is not a
stretch of the imagination to understand where he got the idea from,” Jordan
says, “Dartmoor is home of the legendary Whisht Hounds, or the hounds from hell.”
Scheduled for publication in June, 2019, Whisht Hall is a multilayered thriller that spans twenty years and two continents. “I
like to combine locations, in this case, entirely different countries, and
construct a story around different cultures,” Jordan explains. “My other
location in this book is New Orleans, seemingly a world apart from
Dartmoor. What I ended up with was a
compelling story of the deep south, combined with the dangerous moors of
Dartmoor, and a novel layered with betrayal, deception, and Voodoo.”
Jordan's latest project has been a collection of short stories. Titled Dark Matter, this is a collaboration with her daughter and award-winning illustrator, Sarasota artist, Charlotte Jordan. "Over the years, I'd written quite a collection of short stories," Jordan says. "It was an ambition in the back of my mind to showcase some of them, along with Charlotte's artistic skills." The
stories in Dark Matter are inspired
by horror, the supernatural and the macabre.
“I like to draw on real experiences in my work, and many of these
stories have a thread of truth running through them,” Jordan says.
“Feeding the Pigs” is one example. It tells
the tale of three brothers whose lives are bleak. They are ruled by the
eldest, Charles, a vile and violent man who no longer cares for his hungry pigs.
The sense of despair and horror is overcome when his brother, Jack, can no
longer stand the life and confronts Charles, resulting in bloody retribution. The
story was based on a real house Jordan visited in England. “The house was
strangely atmospheric, as if something awful remained within the walls,” she
recalls. “This feeling led me to ask questions of people in the village, and
the story they told me, along with my own impression of the place, led to this
dark tale.”
“The Witch
of Old Cleeve” was also based on an account from a local who lived close to a
small village in Somerset, England. Some of the villagers believed that an old
woman who lived nearby was a witch who could turn people into animals. “This
story sparked my imagination, and, along with the colorful dialogue that the
Somerset characters have, I thought it made for an interesting short story,”
Jordan explains.
Jordan finds many inspirations to draw upon in the old countries of the
world, with their ancient castles and haunted mansions. But when she returned to
Florida, she began researching old stories and haunted places in her home
state. This research inspired her to write a few Florida ghost stories, two of
which, “Shadowlands” and “The Conch House,” are included in Dark Matter.
Like many other people, Jordan enjoys horror stories and the thrill of
the unknown, but only in a good way. “Dark
fiction can make you confront your deepest fears, it can play on your darkest
childhood terrors,” she says. “It allows a reader entertainment on a similar
level to what our Victorian ancestors got, when they attended weekly seances.
The difference being, with literary horror, once you close the book you are
safely back to reality.”
For more information, visit the author's website at www.janejordannovelist.com .
