Yesternight (30 page)

About the author

Meet Cat Winters

About the book

The Peculiar Realities behind
Yesternight

Reading Group Guide

Read on

Further Reading

CAT WINTERS
writes books for teens and adults. Her debut novel,
In the Shadow of Blackbirds
, was named a Morris Award finalist and a Bram Stoker Award nominee. Her second novel,
The Cure for Dreaming
, was named to the Amelia Bloomer Project and the Tiptree Award Long List. Her other books include The
Uninvited
and
The Steep and Thorny Way
, and she's a contributor to the YA horror anthology
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys
.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.

T
YPICALLY
, my novels take months or even years before they evolve from a handful of basic story ideas that I've stored in the back of my mind to an actual, workable book plot. However, I can say for certain that
Yesternight
came into existence on one specific day: March 25, 2015.

During that morning, I went online and spotted a link to an MSN article titled “10-Year-Old Boy Says He Remembers Past Life as Hollywood Actor.” Intrigued, I clicked the link and learned about an Oklahoma boy named Ryan who, from a young age, told his mother that he once lived as someone else. He experienced nightmares and homesickness for Hollywood.

I clicked another link—one that led to a segment about Ryan on the
NBC Nightly News
website. A filmed interview with Ryan and his mother gave me chills. Major chills.

With the help of a photograph in a book about old Hollywood, as well as the assistance of Dr. Jim Tucker, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, Ryan and his parents were able to trace his purported past-life memories to a real person named Marty Martyn, a movie extra who become a successful film agent during Hollywood's Golden Era. Ryan gave dozens of details about his past life that matched up to Marty Martyn's real life, including information about family members, car colors, and even Marty's age when he died.

On the same day that I learned about Ryan and Dr. Tucker, my agent, Barbara Poelle, called me about another book proposal that I was working on. I told her, “I think I might be onto something new,” and sent her the link to the video about Ryan. She, too, was astounded.

That afternoon, we emailed my HarperCollins editor, Lucia Macro, and pitched her the idea of a novel about a seven-year-old girl in the 1920s who states that she lived a past life that ended in a tragic death. In the message, I told Lucia that I planned to write the book from the point of view of a young psychologist trying to make a name for herself in her field. At the time, I didn't know much about the role of women in psychology in the 1920s—or that the psychologist herself would be carrying around her own baggage from the past. However, in less than twenty-four hours,
Yesternight
grew from a basic idea sparked by a real-life modern child to a rapidly forming plot for a full-fledged historical novel. I'm so grateful that my agent and editor encouraged me to take this concept and run with it.

As with all of my books,
Yesternight
's characters, as well as many of its settings, are fictional, but actual people and places served as inspiration. The following is a list of characters and locations from the
novel with ties to strange, fascinating, and sometimes horrifying realities.

Alice Lind.
In 1967, real-life psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson founded the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies to conduct parapsychological research that included the study of children who claim to remember past lives. Dr. Jim Tucker, the psychiatrist who worked with Ryan, is one of the researchers who carried on Dr. Stevenson's work after he passed away in 2007.

Instead of creating a modern-day character based on these two pioneering gentlemen, I decided it would be interesting if my fictional past-life researcher was a woman living in an era when entering the fields of psychology and psychiatry proved challenging in itself for females. I wanted the odds to be stacked against my protagonist so I could explore how much a person would be willing to give up for the sake of pursuing a compelling case that defies explanation.

Once I learned that school psychology was a path open to women in the 1920s and that some school psychologists traveled to rural towns to administer intelligence tests, the character of Alice came to life, and her journey toward discovering Janie O'Daire commenced.

Janie O'Daire.
Janie's behaviors when describing her life as Violet Sunday, as
well as her reactions during her visit to Violet's Kansas home, were inspired by Dr. Stevenson's and Dr. Tucker's accounts of real-life children who claim to remember past lives, including Ryan from Oklahoma (see the Further Reading section for a list of books by both Dr. Stevenson and Dr. Tucker). Janie is not meant to be one specific child, but a representation of dozens of the children discussed in reincarnation texts. Any mistakes made in my portrayal of such a child are entirely my own.

Michael O'Daire
. Michael is an entirely fictional creation, and his role as the owner of a speakeasy can be traced to countless tales of regular people who illegally sold alcohol during the heyday of Prohibition. Full Prohibition came to Oregon in 1916. By the time the Volstead Act went into effect across the entire United States on January 17, 1920, Oregonians already had plenty of practice in finding creative means to procure their liquor, including fetching booze from Canadian ships that parked in international waters off the Oregon coast.

Gordon Bay, Oregon
. Gordon Bay is a fictional town, loosely based on the coastal city of Rockaway Beach, Oregon, as well as other towns that turned into tourist stops once the railroads connected the Oregon coast to the inland cities over the mountains.

Hurricane force winds do, indeed, occasionally hit the region during intense storms, and a lady is likely to lose her hat.

Winchester Mystery House.
The house that Alice mentions as being a prime example of the “séance frenzy” and America's “bizarre fascination with sideshows and amusement parks” actually existed in the 1920s . . . and it still operates as a tourist attraction to this day (I've visited it twice). Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune, built the elaborate 160-room mansion over a period of almost three decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During her lifetime, rumors circulated about her supposed madness, although modern-day books and articles refute that claim. Publications of the era stated that she hired workers to continuously expand the house in order to appease the spirits of all of those killed in the Old West by Winchester rifles.

Sarah Winchester died in September 1922, and in the spring of 1923, the house's new owners, John and Mayme Brown—a couple with ties to an amusement park in Canada—opened the property for guided tours.

The attraction is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd., San Jose, California. Its website is www.winchestermystery house.com.

Violet Sunday
. I decided to make the fictional Violet Sunday of Janie's past a mathematical genius when I read that children who remember past lives sometimes bring the skills of their former life into their new one. “Mathematical pioneers” is a category of women's history that doesn't often receive much attention, but nineteenth-century ladies did, in fact, make their marks on the worlds of mathematics and computing (especially when their families actually allowed them to receive a higher education). Two prime examples are Ada Lovelace and Philippa Fawcett. From 1842 to 1843, Lady Lovelace, daughter of famed poet Lord Byron, created the first algorithm ever to be used on a machine. She is credited with being the world's first computer programmer. In 1890, Philippa Fawcett became the first woman to take top place in the prestigious Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, shattering long-held beliefs about the inferiority of the female brain.

Cornelia Gunderson
. From the beginning, I imagined Alice Lind's investigation into Janie's past life leading to grisly discoveries about a serial killer in the Great Plains, simply because several of the most notorious mass murders in United States history occurred in farmhouses in the nation's heartland.

Some examples:

From 1871 to 1873, a group of innkeepers known as the Benders of Labette County, Kansas, brutally murdered an estimated one to two dozen guests in their hotel. The “Bloody Benders” have gone down in history as America's first documented case of serial killers.

In 1912, an unknown attacker killed eight people with an ax in a farmhouse in Villisca, Iowa. The “Villisca Ax Murder House,” incidentally, now operates as a tourist attraction that includes overnight tours and ghost hunting (www.villiscaiowa.com).

In 1959, two ex-convicts out on parole tied up and murdered a family by the name of Clutter in their home in Holcomb, Kansas—an incident that Truman Capote turned into the bestselling true-crime book
In Cold Blood.

For Cornelia Gunderson's character, I combined the crimes of the aforementioned Benders, who reportedly attacked their Bender Inn guests with a hammer before cutting their throats, with traits of Belle Sorenson Gunness, a Norwegian-born Indiana woman who murdered somewhere between twenty-five and forty people in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including her two husbands, her children, and numerous suitors, the latter of whom she lured to her “murder farm” through newspaper ads in lovelorn columns. According
to numerous reports and rumor, both the Benders and Belle Gunness fled the scenes of their killing sprees when they came close to getting caught and went into hiding for the rest of their lives. Investigators found multiple bodies buried on the grounds of both properties.

Friendly, Kansas, and the Hotel Yesternight, Nebraska.
Both locations are fictional; however, all of the homes and the inn discussed in this Author's Note—as well as my own visits to reputedly haunted houses and hotels—infuenced the creation of the Hotel Yesternight.

   
1.
      
Yesternight
is a novel where the known and unknown collide and paranormal events are definitely a possibility. Have you ever experienced something in your life that can't be explained away rationally?

   
2.
      
At one point in the novel Alice maintains that “psychology explains everything.” Is it possible that psychology can explain Alice's increasing conviction that Janie is indeed Violet reincarnated?

   
3.
      
Alice's life at first seems like an open book. However, as the novel progresses we discover that her family represses not only their acknowledgment of her sister Bea's sexuality, but also any acknowledgment of Alice's sexuality. And Alice herself has repressed her memories of her unwanted pregnancy. Did the Linds' tendency to avoid such subjects strike you as normal behavior for the time period? Or did you find the family's repression to be extreme?

   
4.
      
Is it possible Janie is a child prodigy with high mathematical ability? Is it possible Alice was just a child with behavioral difficulties? Or do you feel that the only way they could know what they do is to truly be the products of reincarnation?

   
5.
      
Bea insists to Alice, “Don't insert yourself into other people's lives.”
How do you think that Alice's tendency to do this has affected her life so far?

   
6.
      
Hotels play a large role in
Yesternight.
Alice stays in Michael's hotel at the opening of the book, as well as in the Hotel Yesternight and others. What do you think hotels symbolize with regard to the story?

   
7.
      
Is Rebecca right to be suspicious of Michael's motives with regard to their daughter? Is he a man who only wants to discover the truth, or does he want to exploit his child for profit?

   
8.
      
What do you think the police think happened to Michael that would make him run off into the blizzard?

   
9.
      
What do you think of the ending? What do you believe is really going on with John?

   
10.
      
What do you think will happen to Alice in the future?