Amanda Jayatissa and her Childhood Fears.
I’ve always considered myself supremely lucky because my mother never censored what I read or watched as a child. If I could understand the words (and there was an ever-present dictionary for when I didn’t), everything was fair game. Which was great because I realised very early on that I was a huge fan of horror movies. I remember watching Cat People with my older cousins when I was five and giggling my way through Poltergeist when I was seven. I graduated from R L Stine’s Goosebumps series to Stephen King’s IT when I was about eleven, and loved it all.
My mother only had one request— she’d watched The Exorcist in the cinema when she was a young girl, and it scared her so much that she had nightmares about it even as an adult. Like any caring mother, she begged me not to watch it.
And like any self-respecting teenager, it was the first thing I did when I went for my first sleepover. To date, I don’t know if it was my mother’s voice in the back of my mind or being raised in a relatively religious household, but watching The Exorcist scared the living daylights out of me. I remember having to stay up late to study for my exams and imagining a possessed Linda Blair backwards-spider-walking (if you’ve watched the film, you know what I’m talking about!) around my living room.
Ever since then, I’ve had a morbid obsession with possession stories— though none have really been able to frighten me like The Exorcist.
When I was writing my most recent book, Island Witch, I revisited a lot of what I’d read and watched about possession over the years. Interestingly, most of these stories examine possession from a Western lens, weaving in exorcisms through Christian practices. Growing up in Sri Lanka, I knew this wasn’t always the case. We had our own ways of expelling demons on this island, and that was what I wanted to write about.
And so, after tacking on a rosary above my computer, just in case, I set about the task of researching tovils (exorcisms) and yakku (demons) in Sri Lanka. Discovering them sent the same chills down my back as when I watched The Exorcist for the first time, which was how I knew I was on the right track.
It’s funny, looking back, how something that creeped me out that much as a child has now come full circle to being a central theme in my latest writing. But then, I suppose, this is what fear does— it buries itself deep into your psyche, looking for a way to bubble up. And if I manage to scare a few others along the way, that’s every horror writer’s dream.
Island Witch by Amanda Jayatissa
Being the daughter of the village Capuwa, or demon-priest, Amara is used to keeping mostly to herself. Influenced by the new religious practices brought in by the British Colonizers, the villagers who once respected her father’s craft have turned on the family. Yet, they all still seem to call on him whenever supernatural disturbances arise. Now someone – or something – is viciously seizing upon men in the jungle. But instead of enlisting Amara’s father’s help, the villages have accused him of carrying out the attacks himself. As she tries to clear her father’s name, Amara finds herself haunted by dreams that eerily predict the dark forces on her island. And she can’t shake the feeling that it’s all connected to the night she was recovering from a strange illness, and woke up, scared and confused, to hear her mother’s frantic cries: No one can find out what happened. Lush, otherworldly, and recalling horror classics like Carrie and The Exorcist, Island Witch is a deliciously creepy and darkly feminist tale about the horrors of moral panic, the violent space between girlhood and adulthood, and what happens when female rage is finally unleashed.
Amanda Jayatissa
When she isn’t recovering from a self induced book hangover, Amanda runs corporate trainings on Communication Skills Development, and works tirelessly as the Chief Taste Tester at the cookie shop she co-owns. She grew up in Sri Lanka and has lived in the California bay area and British countryside, before relocating back to her sunny island, where she lives with her husband and two Tasmanian-devil-reincarnate huskies.
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