I was at the Writer's Police Academy in Wisconsin in 2015, at Katherine Ramsland's session on the psychology of child serial killers. She put up some slides of "the house-tree-person test", which is a (discredited, I must say) method of diagnosing personality disorders and scoring general mental health. Quite simply, the clinician asks the subject to draw a house and a tree and a person and then interprets the picture.
Dr Ramsland showed pictures by healthy members of the general population, with no psychiatric diagnoses. These were . . . normal (boring). She also showed us pictures by some quite unwell people, which were . . . far from normal. Poor wee scones; I can't think of many things more frightening than full psychosis, can you? To be in such distress, with the added horror of other people not believing that the monsters are real? Dreadful.
Setting aside all sympathy, (writers are allowed to have a sliver of ice in the heart, right?) what interested me most was the question of the pictures people draw when they're deliberately trying to mislead the doctor. When they're faking.
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PLOP!
My book had arrived. I spent the rest of the hour in Dr Ramsland's class furiously scribbling the bare bones of a tale about two women, one who draws ever more baroque houses (and trees and persons) and one who only ever draws, in the top left-hand corner of the paper, a tiny square bisected by a vertical line and a horizontal line.
If you want to find out what this picture means . . . as I said, the book is out today in the UK and coming to the US on the 8th of September.
What do you think of the two covers and titles, since we're on the subject of interpreting pictures anyway?
