CHENNAI: What happens when you combine four daring teenagers with a haunted house that holds secrets darker than it seems? You get Andaleeb Wajid’s spine-chilling graphic novel, ‘Scare Walk’. What starts as youngsters Angelina, Ishaan, Veera and Dhruv venturing into a Halloween-themed scare walk becomes a sinister story of facing your fears and what happens to you in the process.
Bengaluru-based author Andaleeb has published over 45 books in 14 years, and her novels fall into a range of different genres including romance and young adult fiction. However, her favourite genre to write happens to be horror. “I find it incredibly challenging to write. I love getting into the atmosphere, delving into the protagonists’ minds, seeing what makes them tick and then undoing it all,” she says. “When people go for a haunted house experience, it’s with the knowledge that these scares are not real, that they’ll emerge on the other side and continue with their lives. But what if everything that happened inside was really happening? That was the idea that I played with for this book.”
The graphic novel, published by HarperCollins India, is set in Bengaluru, which was an intentional choice. According to Andaleeb, the idea of setting something scary in an environment that is known to us, and that we are comfortable with, adds an extra edge to horror. Instead of happening in a misty hill station, the idea of something scary in our own backyard is even more terrifying, right? “I get spooked very easily. So, writing horror, especially something like ‘Scare Walk’ was a way for me to be in control of my fear, and to create that sense in my readers. Reading and writing books are a form of escapism to me but writing horror is different. It’s an escape to the sort of world where the worst thing imaginable happens and yet, life goes on,” she explains.
When she was first writing the book, she did not know that it would be transformed into a graphic novel. So, her focus was on the internal journey of the protagonists and how it would shape them towards the end. She worked on psychological horror, rather than grotesque visuals which only have a momentary impact. Throughout the story, the protagonists end up in difficult scenes, interacting with their surroundings. But when editor Tina Narang posed the prospect of a graphic translation, Andaleeb was excited. She worked closely with talented animation filmmaker, director and illustrator Upamanyu Bhattacharyya. With only a few online discussions, Upamanyu was able to do justice to the characters based on just his reading and interpretation of the text.
Despite being a horror novel, ‘Scare Walk’ has many nuances that could be easily missed on the first reading, especially regarding time. “I feel this format requires a more intensive reading,” she adds, in reference to the comic style. “Most people assume that reading a graphic novel would be certainly easier than reading text but I think it’s the opposite. It requires the reader to give a little more of themselves in understanding everything that has been depicted on the page.” To Andaleeb, the biggest challenge of writing the book was acknowledging the fact that horror is subjective. What scares one person may not scare someone else, and she still grapples with that!