Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(89)

Can you tell us how you came to write this book? Which came first: the story or the photographs?

I have no idea where most of my ideas come from, but Miss Peregrine has a very specific origin story. A few years ago, I started collecting vintage snapshots—the kind you can find in loose piles at most flea markets for fifty cents or a buck apiece. It was just a casual hobby, nothing serious, but I noticed that among the photos I found, the strangest and most intriguing ones were always of children. I began to wonder who some of these strange-looking children had been—what their stories were—but the photos were old and anonymous and there was no way to know. So I thought: If I can’t know their real stories, I’ll make them up.

The photographs came first, but I never stopped collecting. Even as I was writing the story I was finding more photographs to work in. Ultimately, the photos and the story influenced each other. Sometimes I’d find a new photo that just demanded to be included in the story, and I’d find a way to work it in; other times I’d look for a certain type of photo to fit a story idea I had. It was a fun, strange, organic writing process, unlike anything I’d attempted before.

Were there any great photographs you just couldn’t work into the narrative?

Tons. Some will find their way into future books, whereas others are likely to remain orphans. For instance, I have this great picture of a little boy in suspenders standing in a doorway, and he’s dramatically lit and wears this dour expression, and he’s strangely immobile, despite supposedly being in the act of coming through a doorway. Why is he just standing there? He’s obviously about to deliver some terrible news—or maybe eat your brain. It looks like a still from a noir film. Unfortunately, I never found a use for it in the story.





Somewhat more tragic is the story of the Santa that got away. There are many disturbing pictures of department store Santas in the world, but early on in the writing of this book, I found the ultimate creepy Santa a man with deep, black circles around his eyes, looking as if he’d just come off a three-day bender, and the eyes themselves— blank. I assume the man has pupils, which were somehow blurred when the exposure was made, but in this picture they’re invisible, his eyes a milky white. It was this photograph, in fact, that gave me the idea to make all the wights’ pupils blank. Unfortunately, the fellow who owned it was, understandably, pretty attached to the photo, and it took me over a year to convince him to sell it to me, by which time the book had already gone to press. So the wight-in-disguise department store Santa that appears in chapter 9 is only the second scariest department store Santa I’ve ever seen.

Clowns are almost universally recognized as scary, and though I had a fairly good picture of a strange-looking clown and a little girl, I didn’t think the book needed any more photos of people in masks or heavy makeup, or little girls in close proximity to menacing shadows, Santas, and the like, so I passed it over. But there are so many strange things about this picture, I wanted to share it. Just look at the clown’s face. Is it just me, or is he terribly scarred?

How many photos did you collect before settling on the final fifty that appear in the book?

In addition to combing through bins of old photos at flea markets and antiques shops, I spent many hours in the homes of a few very patient and generous collectors, searching boxes and folders and albums overflowing with amazing images. Given that most collectors own ten thousand photos at a minimum—and often many more than that—I’d guess that more than one hundred thousand snapshots passed through my hands while creating this book.



You attended film school at the University of Southern California, and you’ve worked in the film and television industries. How did these experiences inform the creation of Miss Peregrine? Many critics have remarked on the book’s cinematic qualities.

It’s difficult to quantify, because this is my first novel; if I’d written one before film school and another afterward, I’d have a more scientific answer. But I do think that writing screenplays and making films trained me to think in pictures, and sequences of pictures, in a way I didn’t before. Perhaps as a result I tend to visualize scenes in a way I wouldn’t have five years ago. Sometimes when I’m writing, I imagine that I’m directing the scene—which I am, inasmuch as readers’ minds conjure pictures of what they’re reading. For instance: They walked into the room. That’s a wide shot. Her lip trembled is a close-up.

The book begins with a passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and of course Jacob receives a book of Emerson’s work from his grandfather. Can you discuss how Emerson’s philosophy informed this story?

Emerson figured much more heavily into the first draft of Miss Peregrine, but his involvement was whittled down quite a bit. Part of that had to do with the story changing direction. In the old version, Jacob met the peculiar children gradually, and it took him several chapters to finally and fully believe they were real. Emerson often speaks about the possibility of fantastic things that exist just out of view, and many of his most famous quotes almost seem to refer directly to the peculiar children. “The power which resides in him is new in nature,” he writes in Self-Reliance (1841), “and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” That’s certainly true of the children, and of Jacob, too. Then there’s this line, from Nature (1836): “In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.” It’s not hard to imagine that Emerson is describing the deep woods surrounding Miss Peregrine’s house and its strangely youthful inhabitants.