As a fan of time travel stories, I was entranced by Lauren Carter’s astoundingly weird and fantastic latest novel, The Longest Night, set on the winter solstice in 2022 in coldest Minnesota when a young woman is locked out of her parents’ house, and finds shelter at a strange house nearby which turns out to be the portal to a time warp. Inside the house resides an evil doctor and his nurse, and when Ash manages to escape from them, she finds herself in 2001, before she was born, on September 11, to be specific, a day of great consequence for the entire world, but also personally for Ash and her family. And the big question, as anyone who has read a time travel narrative before well knows, is Dare she disturb the space/time continuum?? Is it possible to change the past when it still lies in the future? And why does the future still seem so uncertain, even if you know exactly how it will unfold?
In our conversation, Carter and I discuss the cubicle job where this strange story begin, how she wove many different pop culture references into the story, and how she was inspired by Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes, another impossible love story set across different dimensions, the kind of reader that leaves the reader absolutely spellbound.
About The Longest Night:
A taut and uncanny thriller about one girl’s search for home, melding time travel, magic realism, horror, and literary suspense.
One forty-below December night, 18-year-old Ash Hayes finds herself locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota. She seeks shelter from the freezing cold and certain death at the closest house on the road, with neighbours she hasn’t yet met.
The next morning, everything is off-kilter – the neighbours’ house has no mirrors or modern technology, and all the windows blocked. When Ash tries to call her parents, their numbers are disconnected. One of the strange inhabitants there is a doctor, who offers Ash a terrible form of help and won’t take no for an answer. In her efforts to get out of the house and back to her regular life, though, Ash finds herself transported to an even stranger place and time, setting off a chain of events that connect with (and alter) her past and her future.
For fans of Mona Awad and Emily St. John Mandel, The Longest Night is a high-stakes, genre-twisting story about searching for something stable in a world where reality is ever-changing and can’t be trusted.
Lauren Carter is the author of six books including her latest novel, The Longest Night, which has been described as “mind-bending, psychologically disturbing, and utterly captivating.” Her second novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction from the Manitoba Books Awards while her short story collection Places Like These was a finalist for the 2023 INDIES Book of the Year Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and brings her passion for writing, adventure, and community to events organized through her business Wild Ground Writing Retreats.
