“My best comfort reading from age 12, or even before that, was usually ghost stories. I really love that kind of reading experience,” Emily Arsenault of Shelburne Falls told me in a recent interview. “Something that readers can read around Halloween season by a fire with the wind howling outside.”
Arsenault has managed to achieve just that sort of absorbing, ever-so-slightly creepy storytelling in her ninth book, the young-adult novel “When All the Girls Are Sleeping” (Delacorte Press, 448 pages, $17.99).
The book is indeed technically for young adults; its protagonist is in high school. I would argue that its subject matter and plotting should appeal to adults as well. I certainly devoured the book.
Set in an elite girls’ boarding school, the book centers on a scholarship student named Haley who lives in the senior dormitory. In January and February of each year, according to school lore, a ghost known as the winter girl appears to one or more of the current dorm residents.
Haley is haunted by more than the ghost. The previous February, her former best friend Taylor plunged (or was she pushed?) from her bedroom window in the same dorm and fell to her death.
Taylor’s brother sends Haley a video taken on the dead girl’s phone that indicates that the ghost may have been involved in this fatality.
Driven by a mixture of curiosity and guilt, Haley sets out to figure out what happened to Taylor and to uncover the truth behind the ghost. She burrows through the school archives, talks to alumnae who claim to have encountered the ghost, and nervously detects signs of ghostly visitation in the dorm.
She begins to realize that the ghost has been spotted on and off for more than a century by generations of alums. She eventually gains knowledge of the winter girl’s origins and the specter’s continuing presence. She learns a lot about the school — and about herself — along the way.
The novel is part teenage drama, part ghost story, and part mystery. Arsenault cleverly gives the reader (and Haley) just enough information to keep the plot going, and the author and Haley manage to pull all of the threads together by the book’s end.
I asked Emily Arsenault how she came up with the idea for the story. She explained that the initial spark came from stories that circulated during her time at Mount Holyoke College in the 1990s.
“There was one dorm in particular that had a lot of ghost lore associated with it,” she noted of Wilder Hall. “There were some stories that I kind of put in the book, but I changed them a lot. I kind of ran with it and took it in a lot of directions.”
She based the appearance of the dorm in her novel on another of Mount Holyoke’s dormitories, Pearson’s Hall. “It’s more of an ominous building, if you know what I mean. It has that 19th-century state-hospital look,” she said.
“When All the Girls Are Sleeping” contains a fair amount of history as Haley explores real-life ghost and paranormal stories over the years. The novel also offers insight into Haley’s life and personality.
“I definitely tried to make it a psychological character study of someone who is that age and who is very conflicted,” said Arsenault.
She observed that many critics seem to believe that having a protagonist like Haley, who is less privileged than those around her, can be a slightly hackneyed literary convention. She defended her decision to make Haley a scholarship student, arguing that it enhances the complexity of the teen’s character.
“You’re often questioning yourself when you’re in that situation. Is this who I am now, or is this just the place that I’m in and I’m going to go back to being who I was when I go back home? I wanted to explore that,” she mused.
She argued that Haley’s particularly insecure situation helps the novel explore teenage identity and survival in general.
Stepping back from the content of the novel, I asked Arsenault about her writing process.
“When I’m immersed in a project, I usually have a goal of time spent rather than pages written,” she commented, explaining that if the goal was to write X number of pages a day, not all of those pages would necessarily be usable.
“When I’m doing well, a draft could happen in nine months, but usually it’s closer to a year, a year and a half,” she elaborated.
In the case of her new book, that process was lengthened a bit by the pandemic. It slowed down the process for her publisher and for the novelist herself: her daughter spent much of the time at home instead of at school.
Arsenault used the extra time to revise and tighten the book. “I always knew what the ending would be, but I’d had difficulty finding the right clues to roll it out in a way that was fair but not obvious,” she told me. “I found ways to position parts of clues.”
Now that “When the Girls Are Sleeping” is making its way out into the world, Arsenault is contemplating her next project. She has started books for two different age groups and is trying to decide which to pursue next.
She told me that she knew she wanted to be an author when she was around 10 years old.
“I didn’t really pursue it seriously until I was, I want to say, almost 30. There was a point in my 20s where I didn’t think it was possible,” she said.
Unlike many authors, she moves from books for young people to books for adults. She also mixes genres from general fiction to mystery and paranormal novels. This flexibility can make Arsenault a little hard for her publishers to market.
Nevertheless, the variety gives her creativity and brings her joy. “Tt’s been fun to hop around,” she concluded. “I’ve been lucky.”
Emily Arsenault will sign copies of “When All the Girls Are Sleeping” on Saturday, July 17, from 2 to 4 p.m. outside Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.