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Sam’s name comes from Samhain. Chris’s comes from Christmas.
I wanted the Hollow Cove trilogy to begin with Sam and
Samhain, at the beginning of the darker season. The evenings draw in, lanterns
appear, and familiar places look a little different in the dark. A suitable
time, I thought, for Sam to discover her neighbors have somewhat more going on
than she’d realized.
Chris’s name points toward the other end of the trilogy:
Christmas and the turn of the year. An ending, certainly, but also the
possibility of beginning again. Hope. Light. The tentative business of
imagining that the next chapter might hold something good.
Preferably with fewer police interviews, though I make no
promises.
Those names gave me a quiet thread to follow through the
books. Sam and Chris have things to discover about each other and themselves,
alongside the considerably less comfortable discoveries involved in a murder
investigation.
I love that their names hold a little of where the story
begins and where I hope to leave them. We enter the darker season with Sam. By
Christmas and New Year, there’s still darkness outside, but there are people to
sit beside, lights in the windows, and reasons to look ahead.
All of this is quite a lot to ask two perfectly ordinary
names to carry. Fortunately, they haven’t complained.
Do you enjoy discovering hidden meanings in characters’
names—and has one ever made you see a story differently?
