Q&A with Ivy Grimes, author of The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion

This week I spoke with Ivy Grimes, whose debut novel The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion was recently published by Cemetery Gates Media. It’s about a pair of sisters, Ruby and Opal, who were raised deep in a forest. Ruby leaves to provide for their sick mother by marrying Glaucon Blaubart, the heir to a strange mansion. It kept reminding me of this book I’d read a while back on the custom of the castle, and I haven’t really been able to develop this thought, but I’ve been thinking that’s where chivalric romances and fairy tales meet. I don’t know. The point is, you should check out The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion.

Adam: Can you start by telling us how this novel came to be and what it was like working with your publisher, Cemetery Gates Media?

Ivy Grimes: I’ve started writing a bunch of novels and finished a few, but this is the first one I’ve polished and pushed completely out of the nest. Reading useless novels has been my obsession since childhood, after all.

It was fun to work with Cemetery Gates, and they’ve published many writers I admire, including my friend Christi Nogle’s wonderful novel Beulah. I greatly appreciate their support.

Adam: The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion is riffing on Bluebeard and fairy tales and the gothic novel. What was it that drew you towards these genres?

Ivy Grimes: I do love riffing! Before I wrote this novel, I read several books by Marie-Louise von Franz where she’s theoretically giving a Jungian analysis of various fairy tales, but I feel like her books are actually creative works springing mostly from her own strange mind. I believe it’s in “Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales” where she discusses the Grimm’s “Snow White and Rose Red,” and I found that especially fascinating. She has very little patience for the characters’ appalling naivety. It was this vision of sisters kept separate from the world that inspired the story. Once they’re forced to enter into society, they discover that Bluebeards and lackeys inhabit it.

In short, I feel that fairy tales contain awful secrets about the human experience, especially the female experience, and I’m almost afraid to fully explore them. My fear is what draws me to them. In general, though, I have a complicated relationship with genre. There are some gothic elements to this novel (a creepy house with secrets), but it’s not a classic gothic tale by any means. It’s more like Cold Comfort Farm than Rebecca.

Adam: Something I noticed is that most of the characters are well-meaning, but they’re forced into conflict or cruelty by these customs. Glaucon doesn’t want to murder the wives, so instead they get locked up, for example. Is this something inherent in these genres, or maybe your commentary on the South, or am I misunderstanding this or what?

Ivy Grimes: I don’t think this is necessarily inherent to the genre, though in Jane Eyre, it’s in part a warped idea of propriety that causes Mr. Rochester to imprison his “mad wife” in the attic. When I described Blaubart’s desire to preserve his ugly family legacy, I was in part thinking of the absurdity of some Southern attempts to finesse the crimes of the past and present in order to save face. Some Southern customs are entertaining…the strong sense of hospitality, the curiosity that borders on nosiness, the odd old sayings. Others are dangerous. There are many attempts to “preserve the heritage” of the South by people who don’t think of themselves as white supremacists. I think if we could approach the past with humility and less defensiveness, we could create communities where we’re all on equal footing. I don’t know how to write a political novel, though, and that’s not what The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion is. It’s simply satirizing some behaviors I’ve seen. Gender-based customs are slow to change in the South, which I enjoyed poking fun at in this novel.

Adam: Is there a secret for creating a world that feels eerie, or ever-so-slightly off?

Ivy Grimes: The quickest way is probably to be a slightly off person. I feel sort of mystical about trying to reach a particular state of mind when I write…I’d describe it as a combination of curiosity, amusement, and dread. Like Alice exploring Wonderland. I want to be able to surprise myself, and I want to be open to many possibilities. I can’t stay there the whole time when I write…often I’m doing practical writing tasks, gilding the doorknobs and writing “she said.” But I love to be in that frame of mind as much as I can.

Adam: On the one hand the novel does a great job of conveying the foreboding feeling of being a guest in a big, unwelcoming house, but at the same time there’s a great deadpan to a lot of this. For example, the household is so set in its ways that it feels like the story might be set in the 1800s, but then we’re reminded that can’t be the case because Ruby is having the maid bring her mozzarella sticks. Is it difficult finding the right balance between the tension that drives the story forward and the humour?

Ivy Grimes: It definitely wasn’t difficult for me, but it might be difficult for some readers to enter this story and achieve the kind of fictional immersion that so many readers love. To me, the whole point of writing is working in the state of mind I discussed earlier, the delight of curiosity and absurdity. I love to read (and write) a novel that surprises me right out of the story on a regular basis. I am sympathetic to readers who are looking for something different, for that sense of living in a story that comes to life, but I don’t think they’ll find that in my writing. I respect their taste completely, but I’m not willing to give up the part of writing I love to please them.

Adam: My favourite character, by far, was Didymus, “the Nephew of God,” who the sisters call Phew. I feel like the Southern bible-obsessive is kind of a stock character at this point, but Phew feels special. He’s such a weird guy. Can you tell us a little more about him?

Ivy Grimes: He’s my favorite character, too! He’s a loner mystic who isn’t really part of any clear tradition like other Southern bible-obsessives you might know. He belongs to a one-man church. He wants to give other people spiritual counsel, but it’s almost impossible for him to relate to other people. He mostly confuses them. And yet, he proves to be important in the end. I love mystics, of course, and I believe that their personal journey does help others, just not in five easy steps. Often by wandering off the main trail, mystics can inspire others to follow their own crooked paths.

Thanks Ivy!

Ivy is also a prolific short story writer who just a few days ago was longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2025. You can check out some of her recent work here, here, and here. Also be sure to check out her newsletter.

You can find The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion here, here, and here.