If you need a label for Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians, you can call it a ghost story, given its expertly crafted suspense and otherworldly chills. But this latest novel by the acclaimed Toronto author is as difficult to classify as any of his previous works, including the 2008 bestseller The Killing Circle.

Set in the fictional town of Grimshaw, Ontario (a smaller, more unsettling version of Pyper’s hometown of Stratford), The Guardians weaves between the mid ’80s and the present while recounting the fate of four childhood friends obsessed with an empty, legend-ridden house and the grisly secrets it keeps.

Pyper certainly knows how to deliver jolts from the current of dread he sets up. The Guardians is charged with the kind of imagery that’s been leaving readers sleepless since the days long before there were electric lights to leave on. Creaking stairs lead down to a dirt-floored cellar, ghastly figures loom in darkened upper windows, uncanny shapes flicker at the edge of sight.

Yet, like such revered writers as Henry James and Edith Wharton, Pyper is just as interested in rendering the macabre visions in finely honed prose that reveals hidden aspects of human psychology.

The Georgia Straight caught up with him at the Sylvia Hotel, during his recent visit to Vancouver.

Georgia Straight: Is The Guardians getting categorized by some people as a horror novel?

Andrew Pyper: What’s kind of interesting”¦is that the commentary about “What do we call it?” seems to have fallen on “Who cares?””¦

So that’s good. I hope that’s indicative of a larger, culture-wide maturation or moving away from the anxieties of genre, the anxieties of category. That’s my hopeful side. The more pessimistic side is, like, “Oh, no, we’re still hindered by being overly concerned about these questions.”

But I don’t mind “literary thriller” or “psychological thriller”, because it says that there’s thrills, hopefully. If you don’t find it thrilling, then I’ve failed. But at the same time, it doesn’t repel people. I don’t mind people calling it horror, because hopefully it has a horrific aspect too. But again, you say the word horror and you can feel some people taking backward steps toward the door.

In the beginning I would try to direct the discussion of genre—“No, call it this,” or “Oh, don’t call it that.” And I’ve moved more into “I don’t care,” so long as you approach it with an open mind. You needn’t like it, but so long as the judgment isn’t informed by some prejudice.

GS: Still, there are clear ancestors to this kind of story, and conventions in the best sense of the term. When you set out to do something like this, is your energy going toward resisting those conventions? Or is it more like trying to master the conventions and nail them, as you would in writing something like a great rock song?

AP: There was a period of thinking about those questions, because I was long interested in the idea of the haunted-house story. And I think for a long time I didn’t embark on the project because I hadn’t cracked a way in.

I think initially, using the rock-song analogy, I was moving more in a Steely Dan path, kind of like “I know, we’ll put it in 7/8 [time] and we’ll change the metre and”¦”—all these kinds of avoidances and embellishments. And then I put it aside for those reasons. I didn’t want to write a Steely Dan horror novel. [laughs]

And then I kind of simplified it. I went back to a three-chord Kinks song or a Who song, but fusing it with other preoccupations I happened to be having at the time, i.e. friendship and midlife and mortality, and friends who are my age who are suffering bad luck, whether physical or mental or whatever—reflecting on those topics, which in isolation have nothing to do with a haunted house.

But the “eureka” moment came when I stitched those two things together. And then I didn’t necessarily have to explode and reinvent the idea of a haunted-house story. In fact, I could keep it very simple and use a lot of those tropes that we have seen, but embrace them as opposed to saying, “Oh, no, can’t do that—we’ve seen it before.” It didn’t have to pass the total-originality test. I just had to make people the empty house—people with concerns that we haven’t experienced before within the context of the haunted-house story.

So instead of horny teens who are being punished for their sexuality, or the nuclear middle-class American family of The Amityville Horror, who are being punished by arbitrary demons, this was about guys who are projecting their own anxieties and secrets and misgivings into the emptiness of this house. It was less about what the house was doing to them than what they were seeing in the shadows.

GS: What is it about a small-town setting that adds power to this kind of haunted house? It’s hard to think of it having the same uncanny effect if it were located in a large city.

AP: I would venture to say that here’s a place where [you think] “Surely this place is safe.” Here’s a place that’s understandable, where there isn’t a haze of questions and dangers lurking. They’ve got it all figured out. That’s why people choose to live there—it’s a sorted-out place. Ambiguities are stopped at the town limits.

Yet, there’s something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live. We might say, “Never go there,” and board it up. But it’s almost like we need a reservoir for those fears. Without it, I don’t know—perhaps we’d act them out or something.

In cities you can pick up a newspaper and say, “Oh, look, there’s the hideous crime of the day,” so we don’t need it in the city as much”¦.Because there’s more people, if some very small percentage of them are monsters, there are going to be more frequent monster reports in a city.

Whereas in a small town, you wait longer for those terrible stories. Nevertheless, we need to remind ourselves that they’re there. We need to kind of refresh our fear in order to refresh our understanding of how a safe place works.