Ukrainian Gothic

Tom Johnson interviews Nick Owchar about his novel “A Walker in the Evening.”

By Tom JohnsonMay 20, 2025

• Fiction

MICHAEL FROST, the young priest at the center of Nick Owchar’s debut novel A Walker in the Evening (2024), finds his life changed by the discovery of something strange among the belongings of his deceased father, a successful wood-carver in Victorian London. Michael opens one of his father’s crates and finds a carved post, like a miniature totem pole, with a devil’s face that resembles “some goblin huddling in a dark corner of hell.” Finding an object so menacing among his mild-tempered father’s possession’s—which Michael calls “the imp” before learning its purpose in his father’s culture—sends him on a quest that changes his life.

And, as the old adage about art imitating life would have it, that discovery has a parallel in Owchar’s writing of the novel, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a canny and ambitious cross-continental tale of apostolic anxiety.” He made an important discovery during the novel’s composition due to an unlikely reason: a garage sale.

A critic and book editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1995 to 2012, Owchar believes that mystery stories, whether we’re talking about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes or William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose (1980), aren’t just mere entertainment; they possess an imaginative power that can enrich our daily lives. His novel pays tribute to that power as well as adding something more personal: a reimagining of the Ukrainian village where his father grew up in a region that would eventually become part of Western Ukraine. With Ukraine in the headlines so much now, Owchar never expected that contemporary events would create an unexpected context for his story.

I talked to Owchar about his novel’s homage to gothic tales, life in a poor Ukrainian village, and what he found in that garage that made it all possible.

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TOM JOHNSON: The gothic genre appeals to many first-time novelists because it offers them a rich set of storytelling conventions, formulas, and props that never seem to go out of style. But gothic literature, as Hephzibah Anderson explained, is “about far more than heroines in Victorian nightgowns, trapped in labyrinthine ancestral homes”; it’s a way to comment on contemporary issues and crises through the lens of another time and place. Your book’s setting in a Ukrainian village in the early 20th century makes me wonder if the reason that Michael, your narrator, talks about the Ukrainian struggle for identity and has a negative view of Russians was something you included because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

NICK OWCHAR: When I look back at the story, I’m surprised by how much it speaks to the current situation, but I didn’t start out with that intention. This book was just supposed to be my tribute to the old gothic mysteries I love, especially the ones with a ghost or two tangled up in them. That’s what excited me most as I was writing, and my family’s deep roots in the Old Country gave me some rich folk customs and superstitions that seemed perfect for a gothic tale. I definitely had plenty of wonderful props and conventions to work with.

Even if Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine in 2022—or in 2014, when it first moved into the country’s eastern and Crimean regions—I don’t think what Michael says about Ukrainian struggles would be any different. I would have still written it the same way. The Ukrainians, like many other peoples in that part of the world, have dreamed of sovereignty and independence for a long time because they’ve always been dominated by foreign powers. They’ve always had reasons to express their disappointment. What Michael says about this disappointment back in 1909 is something that’s unfortunately still relevant today. 

Your story toggles back and forth between the Ukrainian village in 1909 and 1880s London. Michael has been living in the village for 25 years and seems to be in hiding. He’s changed his name to “Yuri” and given up all connections to England. As he looks back at what happened to him in London and why he left, he describes his involvement in some literary puzzles and conspiracies that seem reminiscent of Dan Brown’s work. Like Robert Langdon (Brown’s protagonist in several books), he tries to uncover the truth about the object carved by his father and that he calls “the imp.” There’s also an interesting rumor surrounding the creation of Dante’s Divine Comedy that has an unexpected role in the story. Did you also have Brown in mind as you were writing?

Dan Brown’s definitely been an influence. I’m not a fan of his writing style, but the way he weaves forgotten history, myth, and art into a modern situation has always been interesting to me. When I first read him, I knew I wanted to try my own story one day. In fact, it was Brown’s work that pushed me to write my own. The rumor about Dante—that he wasn’t the one who actually finished the Divine Comedy—was a nod to Brown’s books. When I was a book critic at the L.A. Times, I remember how the appearance of The Da Vinci Code (book and movie) produced a flood of copycats trying to replicate its success. I was being inundated by them at the paper, so I gathered a bunch of these clones and did a roundup review to see if they were good or not. Some were; many weren’t. The big takeaway for me was that I felt I could probably come up with a book that was at least on par with most of them.

You certainly picked a good gothic subject by having Michael become involved with the brilliant polymath Dante Gabriel Rossetti near the end of Rossetti’s life. A leading painter, poet, and critic of the times, Rossetti was a troubled man; there was a dark cloud of melancholy hanging over the second half of his life that you really captured. 

Yeah, he was an amazing artist who painted these wonderful scenes from the world of medieval chivalry and I’ve always adored them. His poetry too—“The Blessed Damozel” is one of my favorites. He had a very tragic life, as you say. When his wife Lizzie died in 1862 from an accidental overdose of laudanum (many critics think it wasn’t accidental; she was suffering depression after giving birth to their stillborn daughter), Rossetti threw his only manuscript of poems into the casket to be buried with her. He said she inspired the poems so she deserved to take them with her. But years later, around 1869, when his friends George Meredith and Algernon Swinburne were enjoying success as poets, I think he was jealous of them. He felt he was missing out. So Lizzie’s body was exhumed to retrieve the poems, and Rossetti went on to great success—but he never got over the fact that he’d disturbed her eternal rest. He tried many times with séances to ask for her forgiveness. He was plagued by insomnia and depression till the end of his life, probably stemming from guilt.

At first, I wrote a big, bloated version of this novel in which Michael, who is a young Catholic priest fresh out of the seminary, encounters Rossetti and tries to help him with his grief. Rossetti believes that his wife’s ghost has forgiven him and that she is keeping him company in his big old house in Chelsea. Michael doesn’t agree; he thinks that this unseen presence is something diabolical. I liked this version of the story, but it felt a little too derivative to me. It felt too much like the work of an apprentice. I knew there was a good story there in the undergrowth, but a lot of brush needed to be cleared to get to it.

What helped you clear away that undergrowth?

I found a box of notebooks and tapes of my interviews with my father about his life in the village. There was a travel notebook that I kept when we visited the village too. All of it changed the way I structured the story. 

It sounds like a real deus ex machina moment. Can you tell me more about how it affected the writing of the novel?

That’s really a great way to put it—it was definitely my deus ex machina moment. My wife and I were rummaging through our garage for stuff to sell in a yard sale, and I found that box. It wasn’t as chilling as Michael’s discovery of the imp, but it was just as significant. My dad had told me all about his home life, about farming, about old superstitions that kept the village kids away from the river on summer nights (something in the water would get them if they didn’t watch out), and about the night-watch duty, which I thought was fascinating. The idea that every family had to volunteer to patrol the village, from dusk to dawn, seemed so interesting to me.

I realized I could connect this world with the original gothic story about Rossetti. In the process, I pared everything down and cut away all the excesses. I decided to focus on the narrator shifting between his memories of Rossetti and his experiences as he walks around the village over the course of a single night. I found a small indie press excited about this version of the book and ready to support me.

But it wasn’t only the night walk that interested you; it was because the person who does this carries around the imp—the same one that Michael discovers among his father’s belongings, right?

Yeah, that’s right. The thing is, that totem is real. I didn’t invent it. When I went back to my dad’s village with him in the 1990s, it was still there. It wasn’t used anymore, but I saw it for myself. I remember asking my dad and the other villagers why, in the past, everyone had to carry it when they made their nighttime rounds. Nobody had the faintest idea; it was just something they’d been doing for as long as anyone could remember.

My dad told me that it was called the “varta”—which means “guard” or “guardian”—and it had the face and horns of a devil. The idea that the villagers carried this thing was another perfect gothic element for my story—and I couldn’t believe the solution to my novel was right there in our garage. The crux of the revised version hinges on that nightly ritual, which was critical to the village’s security. The local authorities provided minimal support, so the villagers were expected to take care of themselves. That’s where the book’s title comes from: Michael spends his night thinking back on the unsettling events in London that caused him to flee the country. During the course of the night, he has some unsettling experiences too, but thankfully—no spoilers here—he has the varta with him.

I like how Michael/Yuri’s walk around the village, and his journey into his past, is prompted by something many people probably could relate to—an argument with his spouse. Eugenie, his wife, is a very no-nonsense character. He loves her dearly, but she seems very anti-sentimental. Did you base her on anyone?

She’s an amalgam of people, including my aunt Mary, who lived in one of the bigger cities in the western part of the country. Yeah, my aunt was a very no-nonsense person who seemed grumpy all the time and was constantly annoyed by the world’s stupidity. But she had a sentimental side; it was just hidden. I realized after a while that her crustiness was just a defense mechanism, and we became very close before she died. She would tease me if I acted too romantic about life in Ukraine. She’d listen and roll her eyes, and that always brought me back to reality. I really appreciated her, and I think Michael needed someone like that in his life to anchor him. I think I wanted some of her pragmatism and skepticism to be reflected in Eugenie.

Several reviewers have pointed out that the book’s ending is very satisfying—no spoilers here—because it resolves in a very simple, wholesome way.

I’ll take that. I don’t mind if it’s called wholesome. Throughout the story, Michael/Yuri is using his night walk to figure out what to tell Eugenie about what happened to him when he was in London. She’s worried; she thinks he has regrets about exchanging his London life for the hard life of a poor farmer. She’s been having some bad dreams that he is going to leave her. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Near the end, he comes to a simple realization that he hopes will calm her and keep her love and trust—and, possibly, help readers, too. He has this humble, beautiful vision of what it means to be alive and to be loved by the ones he holds most dear. He has this understanding of happiness that is so beautifully simple and that I think can be applied to all of us. Without giving anything away, all I can say is that he understands how important it is to live in the now. That’s what matters most. I hope readers will see that this lesson is transferable to their own lives.