Why I Wrote Bound by the Salt

I think the first seed of Bound by the Salt came from a conversation with a friend.

We were talking about home towns. It wasn't a warm, “remember when?” sort of chat. More a sense of how strange they can feel once you have left them. How you can move away, build a life somewhere else, become a different version of yourself, and yet some part of that place still seems to know you. Still seems to have a claim on you.

The idea we kept coming back to was simple, but it stayed with me:

Your home town never really lets you leave.

That thought became the pulse of the book.

I started thinking about places that hold people. Not just physically, but emotionally. Places full of old stories, buried resentments, family secrets, half-remembered childhood moments, and things nobody quite says out loud. The sort of place where the streets remember your footsteps. Where people know your name before you speak. Where the past is not really past at all, but something still breathing beneath the surface.

From that came Cairnshore.

Cairnshore is the fictional coastal town at the centre of Bound by the Salt. It sits by the sea, cut off in its own strange way, shaped by salt, weather, silence and folklore. I wanted it to feel beautiful and unsettling at the same time. A place where the cliffs, lanes, inn, church, beach and sea all seem familiar at first, but slowly begin to feel wrong. The kind of town that might appear charming to a visitor, but becomes something else entirely once you stay too long.

At the heart of the story is that pull back home.

Georgette has left Cairnshore behind, or at least she thinks she has. But the town has not forgotten her. It reaches out. It calls her back. And once she returns, the question becomes whether anyone ever truly escapes the place they come from.

That was the emotional idea I wanted to explore. We can leave a town, but can we leave what happened there? Can we leave the stories we were raised on? Can we leave family, memory, guilt, fear, inheritance? Or do those things wait for us, quietly, until we are forced to face them?

Of course, because this is horror, that idea becomes something darker.

Cairnshore is not just a place with a past. It is a place with secrets. It has its own rituals, its own rules, its own people who know more than they are willing to say. The sea is always there, pressing against the edges of the town. The tide comes in and goes out, but it always returns. That felt important to me. The sea became a symbol of the book’s central fear: some things always come back.

I have always been drawn to horror that feels rooted in place. Not just monsters jumping out of the dark, but settings that feel alive. Towns, villages, houses, landscapes that seem to have their own memory and appetite. Folk horror especially does this brilliantly. It asks what happens when old beliefs survive beneath modern life. What happens when tradition becomes threat. What happens when a community protects its secrets for so long that the secret becomes more powerful than the people themselves.

That is what I wanted Cairnshore to feel like.

A town of whispers.

A town of salt.

A town where everyone knows something, but nobody says enough.

Writing Bound by the Salt was also a way of exploring how the past shapes identity. The characters are not just fighting what is happening around them. They are fighting what they do not know about themselves. They are caught between love, memory, family and something much older. I wanted the horror to come not only from what is discovered, but from the feeling that the truth has been waiting all along.

There is something frightening about the idea that your life might have been shaped by forces you never understood. That your childhood, your family, your home, your memories, might contain meanings you were never allowed to see. That the place you came from might know more about you than you know about yourself.

That is the fear running underneath the book.

But it is also about longing. Because home towns are complicated. They can trap us, but they can also form us. We can resent them and miss them at the same time. We can want to escape and still feel the ache of belonging. I wanted Bound by the Salt to sit in that uncomfortable space: the pull between wanting to go back and fearing what might be waiting there.

Cairnshore became the perfect place to explore that feeling.

It is a town built on secrets, but also on memory. It is strange, cruel, beautiful and watchful. It does not let go easily. And for the people who belong to it, leaving may only be another way of being called back.

That conversation with my friend never really left me. The more I thought about it, the more it became a story. Then the story became a town. Then the town became Cairnshore.

And Cairnshore, like all places that truly haunt us, refused to stay quiet.