As Reece Carter lay in bed in the dark one night, he noticed the manhole in the ceiling, usually shut tight, was ajar.
When his heart stopped racing, he used a broom to jimmy it back into place. But he couldn’t sleep, as his imagination conjured images of who, or what, could be lurking in the roof space of that creaky old terrace in Paddington.
One of those figures stuck with him — the lonely ghost of a child, with a body of wax and buttons for eyes, peering out, desperate to rejoin the world but unable to do so.
Over the next six months, that girl ghost haunted Carter in the best possible way. He wrote her story, his debut novel, A Girl Called Corpse, and sparked an international bidding war between publishing houses, resulting in a three-book deal and the kind of hype a first-time novelist usually only dreams of.
In mere months, Carter went from being a well-known nutritionist with a secret life writing kids’ fantasy stories after hours, to a full-time novelist. For the boy who grew up on a farm in Tammin, and whose love for reading and writing grew partly from a desire to escape a difficult life at boarding school, the whole thing was, is and will likely remain a surreal experience.
“I still look at the cover and feel like there must be some other Reece Carter; like, who is this guy that’s got my name,” Carter laughs. “I’m not sure when that will change. Having been working towards it for so long, it feels hardwired in my brain to think of it as an aspiration. It’s very hard to wrap my head around the fact that it’s now my reality.”
A Girl Called Corpse is the story of a child ghost, who embarks on an adventure in search of answers about her past, after being left with no memory of her life before she was snatched by witches and taken to a desolate “rock-that-doesn’t-exist”. It’s set around the forgotten fishing town of Elston-Fright, inspired by the area around Geographe Bay where Carter spent his childhood holidays, especially the spot where his mother now lives, along the wild, forested coast between Old Dunsborough and Meelup Beach, past Castle Rock.
Although its roots may be West Australian, the book’s appeal appears global; rights have already been sold in the UK, New Zealand, Norway, Italy and Spain, after Allen & Unwin emerged successful in what publisher Anna McFarlane described as a “highly competitive environment”.
“To say the auction . . . was heated is an understatement — it was a volcanically hot battle between multiple publishing houses — but the truth is I would have waded barefoot through molten lava for the privilege to publish this darkly funny, highly imaginative middle grade debut,” McFarlane says.
Carter remembers the auction well, as he watched the stakes climb higher and higher — the cherry on top of an already dream scenario. Over the course of 48 hours, he was sent a series of escalating offers via “a string of the most exciting emails I’d had in my entire life”, from his newly signed high-profile agent, Gemma Cooper, who also represents Jessica Townsend, the author behind the bestselling Nevermoor series.
Now, as the publication date and a book tour for A Girl Called Corpse approaches, Carter has been thinking back about where it all started. Among the advance copies of the book winging their way west, one is bound for the 39 or so kids at Tammin Primary School, and another for Carter’s high school English teacher at Scotch College, John Webb.
After tracking down Mr Webb’s email address, Carter wrote to the man who, in the acknowledgements for the book, he says changed his life by showing a faith in an ostracised boy that would act as a talisman to keep him writing.
Carter was in Mr Webb’s class in Year Eight and Nine, a time when he was seeking refuge in books from a world where he felt outcast, especially in the “boys’ club” atmosphere of the boarding house.
“I didn’t like boarding school. I wasn’t having a good time there. I didn’t fit in,” Carter says. “I wasn’t particularly academic, but I wasn’t super sporty either, so I flew under the radar for most teachers as well . . . but something made Mr Webb realise I enjoyed writing, and he would encourage me.
“If there was nothing essential happening in class, he would say ‘Reece, just go to the library and write’. I don’t even think I ever even finished a story, it was more like creating characters and writing worlds, but Mr Webb never asked to see any of it. He just had this complete faith in me, that I should just enjoy it, just do my thing. That really stuck with me.”
It is part of the reason why, when Carter went back to writing at age 25, he concentrated on a middle grade audience (ages eight to 12).
“Writing for kids always interested me more than writing for any other audience, for a number of reasons. Firstly, that’s when I fell in love with reading, so I have such fond memories of those books,” he says.
“But I also know how impactful they were for me: when I didn’t feel comfortable at school, not only were they entertainment and escapism, but they felt safe. You would become best friends with the hero and the characters. You’d go on an adventure with them. It gave me a spot to belong, and I know how much that meant to me. So I thought, if I could write a book that has that effect for even one kid, that’s an amazing thing.”
Besides, Carter says, kids’ books can be perfect places to explore big ideas, such as good versus evil, right versus wrong, bravery, friendship and love. “Plus you get to be silly,” he points out. “I’ve got a witch called Scraggleknee and a sort-of-talking spider and sea monsters and all kinds of things you don’t get to do in grown-up books.”
That is not to say that writing has always come easily to Carter. He didn’t write much after high school, while he was travelling and living in Romania and London, but returned to it while studying for his health science degree and postgraduate qualification in Melbourne, then working as a nutritionist. He wrote three full-length manuscripts that “just didn’t go anywhere” (as well as authoring The Garden Apothecary, a guide to herbal medicine, in 2017).
At a book launch for a kids’ fantasy book, he and friend Tobias Madden, who was working in musical theatre, both confessed they were writing a manuscript on the side. But while Madden’s book, Anything But Fine, was published last year, Carter’s third manuscript was not picked up.
“I was feeling a little bit flat, and he’s said ‘look, why don’t you just kind of set your sights somewhere else? I think you’ll get your mojo back if maybe, instead of writing another novel straight away, you write some short stories that can give you that sense of fulfilment and accomplishment’,” Carter remembers.
Carter took his advice and experimented with writing a horror short story as part of a competition to be included in an anthology.
“It did not get selected,” he says, laughing. “But I think that’s what put me in the spooky mindset. I really liked leaning into the slightly darker side of things. So I think I was on the lookout for that kind of story, subconsciously, when the idea for A Girl Called Corpse came along.”
His other manuscripts had taken two years each to write; this one took only six months, from that fateful night under the open manhole. Carter would set an alarm for 4am, down a couple of strong coffees, and use the quiet and clarity of the dawn to write until about 7am, before he walked his dog, Hagrid, hit the gym, and the noise of the day set in.
“It really just kind of fell out of me,” he says. “The first thing I wrote with it was the title, which never changed. It is very much a case where the character came first, and shaped all the other creative decisions along the way. And it just flowed.”
But as any aspiring author knows, having a great story burning a hole in your pocket is only one part of the puzzle. Carter decided to tackle the next — getting a literary agent — by going straight to the top, to UK agent Gemma Cooper. After sending the email to Cooper and a few others, he called Madden “filled with regret”.
“I was saying ‘what have I done? That manuscript is so not ready. I should not have sent it.’ He was saying ‘oh it’s OK, it will be fine. There are so many other agents out there.’ And I was like ‘but I sent it to Gemma Cooper’, and Tobias said ‘oh, oh, did you? Um. No, it’s OK, it’s going to be OK,’” Carter laughs. “But miraculously, she loved it and she offered to take me on.”
Carter has just submitted the draft for the second book in his Elston-Fright series and admits writing it has been a very different experience, likening it to a musician trying to follow up a hit first album.
“Nobody was putting any pressure on me, but I felt an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “When you’re writing that first book, you’re hoping someone will pick it up but if nobody does, the only person you really let down is yourself. There’s no expectation attached to it. Whereas all of a sudden, I had all of these stakeholders, these other people who had already paid money for the book . . .
“You kind of feel like (your writing room) is filled with all these other people, looking over your shoulder. Thankfully, I’ve since heard from my Australian publisher, and my agent, and both of them loved it. I’m not even thinking about book three until next year. I’m just trying to enjoy the ride for now.”