Francesca Miller
Unlike most of the people who make their home in Southern California, I was lucky enough to be born in Los Angeles, actually under the famed Hollywood Sign (directly beneath the “w”, between the “y” and the first “o”) at the old Queen of Angels Hospital. I grew up in a part of the city that achieved infamy in the early 1960’s and is now called South Central. The name may bring a shudder to many but South Central was once a vibrant and multi-ethnic part of the City of Angels. Since my mother adored fine homes and elegant architecture, as a child I often rode the now defunct “red car” through long forgotten areas of the city that reflected its remarkable past. My family often ventured through the famed West Angeles area, Hollywood Boulevard, Broadway with its Edwardian Arcade and famed Bradbury Building, the once elegant Hill and Spring Streets, Central Avenue with its many Edwardian structures and regal Wilshire Boulevard. On Sunday afternoons, we drove past the massive gates of the old Metro, Goldwyn, Mayer Studios and down the palm tree lined boulevards of Beverly Hills. We often took jaunts to the manicured expanses of Forrest Lawn and Hollywood Cemetery.
Like many children who grew up in those pre-Goosebumps years, the macabre attracted my attention, perhaps because I spent my first 18 years on earth being educated in Catholicism, the most Gothic of religions. My interest in the darker aspects of life may also have stemmed from those frequent sojourns to Forrest Lawn and the Hollywood Cemetery or perhaps, the memory of a visit to rural Louisiana for my maternal grandfather’s funeral. His body was laid out in the parlor of a Victorian frame house and then taken to the cemetery in an old fashioned funeral cortege complete with horse drawn buggies.
My father, an avid reader of horror and science fiction, helped to develop my taste for the macabre and as soon as I learned to read, he shared his beloved books with me. I was profoundly affected by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Bloch, Daphne Du Maurier, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Gothic prose of the Bronte sisters and Bram Stoker.
At a very young age, I was introduced to world cinema and the works of Bergman, Hitchcock and Fellini. The films that resonated with me as a child and young adult were always quite dark; The Lodger, Gaslight, Night of the Hunter, the Robert Wise version of The Body Snatcher, The Haunting, The Innocents and of course, Psycho.
I have spent much of my professional life working as an entertainment journalist and movie reviewer in print, on-line and on radio. I have interviewed a plethora of Hollywood luminaries, written numerous “puff pieces” and critiqued hundreds of films. After seven years, I found I could not bear sitting through another studio offering and decided to write my first novel, The Boston Gothic Book, a “holistic” period piece that provides thrills, chills, sex, death and rebirth with architecture, romance and even a few recipes thrown into the bargain. I pray you enjoy it.
