Winter calls for stories. It’s the time of the year when my body feels the most tuned into that ancient aspect of humanity that longs for rest regardless of what our wild contemporary ways of living dictate. After I glance at the snow-covered yard visible through the dining room window, my mind wanders off in search of other worlds. It’s relatively easy, really, to get lost in this way when the landscape you are so familiar with suddenly feels otherworldly.Reading Sarah Pinsker’s novel Haunt Sweet Home had a similar dreamlike effect on me. It’s a ghost story with the lightest touch but still evokes all the altered sensations you’d expect from the genre. The readers follow Mara, a young woman working as a night-shift production assistant on the set of a cheesy renovation-slash-haunted house reality television show. And I mean, we follow her, in the first person and viscerally, as she crawls through the prickly shrubbery that surrounds the New England houses the show is there to document. The atmosphere plays a big part in this story, and Pinsker successfully draws it as a character, taking advantage of Mara’s role on the night shift to depict her sneaking around old orchards, under dark skies, with crickets and owls for company. There is something primeval about being out in nature, communing around a fire, wood carving, playing music together—all elements that are present in Haunt Sweet Home, where they are aptly interspersed with the absurdities of our time, like a hot-plate motel fire, a fog machine used to conjure up ghosts, and the character of Mara’s cousin, Jeremy, a former model-turned-reality television host. Pinsker’s tone, alternating between irreverent and introspective, contributes to this off-kilter quality. The non-linear structure of the narrative, intercepted by the Haunt Sweet Home television show transcripts, also weaves in and out, helping to create that slightly disorienting, uncertain feeling that complements the story. It’s the same feeling that shows up after I notice that I have been staring at the snow-covered whiteness outside my window for too long; I was somewhere else entirely.The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.Ana Preger Hart: Basic cable is undeniably a dying medium, right? I’m interested in this choice to place the basic cable television show at the center of the story.Sarah Pinsker: The idea for the book popped out of nowhere when I had a character in my novel, We Are Satellites, in the hospital, and he was watching whatever was on the TV overhead. I came up with the idea of this show, and he just kept watching episodes while recovering. And I stuck with that, even though I changed the name of the show when I wrote the book. But it’s still the same idea, and it just sounded like a basic cable show to me. I liked the idea that this would be low-budget and that it would be exactly what you expect of it: [the television crew has] a job to do, and they know how to do this, and they’re going to crank it out.APH: I actually watched “Property Brothers” the last time I stayed in the hospital.SP: Exactly. It’s a good choice for those places because if you put on the news, you’re going to raise people’s blood pressure, and if you put on sports, there are people who are going to be bored, so you put on something that will draw people in, even if they’re generally not interested in that kind of thing.APH: And Jeremy definitely has some Property Brothers vibes, like his overall styling. SP: I was thinking of that. And there’s a show where a guy takes people who won the lottery and shows them options for their new homes. And it’s that same kind of really, really shiny persona.APH: So, a follow-up to that is, how do you know about the behind-the-scenes happenings on a TV reality show? Is it all imagined, researched, or maybe you got to sit in on a filming? Or maybe you have a background in television?SP: No. Most of that is researched. I read a lot of people talking about their experiences on shows. A little of it is friends of friends who went on shows or had their doors knocked on because a show was coming around. And then a little bit is from when I had a roommate years ago who was involved in TV production and sort of sidewise from stories she told. But I’ve always been interested in production and the ways that we make reality less real. Reality shows are the least real narratives out there. They have to hit these beats, which necessarily means that they’re moving away from whatever the actual story is. On “Haunt Sweet Home” they have the challenge of scaring the people who are living in the house. There’s a specific type of scaring that has to go on, and I was researching how they make people look genuinely surprised even on scripted TV shows.APH: I enjoyed that part of the story because I don’t watch reality TV. And I’m not really interested in it. But I did always want to know, like Mara, how much of it was scripted and how much was contrived. SP: I’ve had some people say, ‘Well, I don’t like reality TV, so I don’t know if I’ll like your book.’ You don’t need to like reality TV. You can be morbidly interested, and that’ll be enough. You can hate it, and that’ll be enough because that isn’t the point of the book.  APH: I want to talk about houses a little bit because there are a lot of houses in Haunt Sweet Home, and I’m fascinated by old houses, Victorians, and the kind you describe in the book. I’m always looking up New England farmhouses for sale, which are, you know, outside of my budget, but I still do it. I’m curious if you live in an old house.SP: I do. My house is about a hundred years old.APH: And are there any ghosts?SP: No, no way. This house has never given me anything but good vibes. I know a little bit of its history, and some of its history is a little dubious, but the second I walked into it, years and years and years ago, it felt like home. I remember walking in, and it felt so warm and welcoming. And I later realized it was warm because a friend of mine from college who was living here at the time had the oven vaguely open because the heat had broken. For the book, I did look at old New England farmhouses for sale. There’s a creepy fireplace in the book that was in one of the houses, and the porch that was exploding with sunflowers was on one of the houses that was being sold as is. The sort of hippie room with the tie-dyes on the walls—that was in one of the houses, too. So yeah, I just stole liberally from the real estate I was looking at.APH: I wanted to ask you about Mara’s family playing music, but now I see all the stringed instruments hanging behind you so that kind of answers my question. But what about wood carving? Is this also something you just researched? Or do you have any experience with it or know somebody who does it?SP: My wife does some woodworking; she’s good at making pretty things like that. But most of that was also just research and a whole bunch of trips to the Visionary Art Museum, where there are some gorgeous wood carvings, and just reading the bios of those artists. I love doing research for books in general, and the places that it takes you. So, the carving stuff was all researched and guided by where the research took me. APH: So how do you decide how much of your own life to bring into a fictional story? It made me think about Mara with her wood carving, and how much of herself she puts into it. Does the book become a part of you, in a sense, after you write it?SP: It’s an interesting question, whether the book becomes a part of you, because I think a book is an amalgam, you do sort of pull in all these things. It is similar to that carving in that it’s sort of a literalization of write what you know, and putting yourself into the work, and all of that. A book is a combination of all those things. Sarah Pinsker will be discussing Haunt Sweet Home in a conversation with novelist M.L. Rio on Saturday, January 25 at 3 p.m. at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Hamilton Branch, 5910 Harford Road, Baltimore. For more information and to register, please visit https://calendar.prattlibrary.org/event/sarah-pinsker-haunt-sweet-home.