Digital Gaslighting and a #giveaway from Barbara Ross

HALLIE EPHRON: I'm always thrilled when Barbara Ross comes on to talk about a new book, and I'm especially fond of her new Jane Darrowfield "Professional Busybody" series. And today she's giving away a copy of the new book in the series, Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door. I crack up just reading the title, and I'm dying to know where she got the idea for this new book. 

BARBARA ROSS: Sometimes you know the exact moment that sparked the idea for a book. That’s the case for my new mystery, Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door.

Last spring when I was in Milwaukee for a conference, I visited my high school friends Amy and Tom Fritz. Appropo of I- don’t-remember-what (mystery writing I’m sure but beyond that…), Tom mentioned a relatively new phenomenon of abusers torturing their exes using their home security systems. If the person no longer in the home keeps the phone app and codes for the security system, from the other side of town he (it’s almost always a he) can turn off the heat or raise it to the max, blast music, turn lights on and off, open and close the garage door, even change the entry code every time the victim goes out.

“It can happen when one person becomes an expert in the home security system, and the other person, the victim, has never paid much attention to it,” Tom said.

That struck me like blow. That is me. Not the victim of an abusing ex, thank goodness. But the partner in a relationship who understands next to nothing about the home security system.

There was a system in place when we moved into our current house. The previous owners had multiple homes and were rarely in residence. I thought the security system was over-the-top for what we needed. In addition to door alarms and window alarms, there were motion sensors we could set for the whole house when we were out, or for other floors when we were sleeping.

Nonetheless, we extended the system to add a doorbell and a doorbell camera because a) my study is on the fourth floor and I got tired of running to the first to answer the door for people I didn’t want to speak to in the first place, b) until then the only thing that rang when the doorbell was pressed was a princess phone on the third floor that had no other function in our landlineless house and couldn’t be heard from any other location. My husband also added cameras to our roof decks so he could monitor the snow buildup when we were away.

My husband figured everything out and dealt with the security company. I learned the codes to get into the garage and the house and that was it. Our marriage is like that. When one person takes responsibility for a thing, the other one pretty much leaves them to it.

Which means I am one of those people who could be tortured by their home security system. If I walked into a room in my house at night and alarms started going off around me, I wouldn’t have a clue what to do.

Once I knew what I wanted to write about, I started doing research. At first, I wasn’t even sure what to call this type of harassment. There’s lots written about cyberbullying and cyberstalking, which take place entirely online, or doxing in which sensitive personal real-world information is exposed online. But what was this? Once I found the words cyber gaslighting and digital gaslighting the articles flowed, each one more horrifying than the next.

The term gaslighting comes from the 1938 play Gas Light, and subsequent 1940 and 1944 movies. The plot in each varies slightly but the theme is the same: a husband socially isolates his wife and works to convince her that what she is seeing, hearing and experiencing isn’t real, causing her, and others, to question her sanity. The story is set in 1880s London and a key feature is the dimming of the gaslights in the couple’s home. (I write about seeing the 1944 movie in Key West on the edge of the pandemic here.)

Gaslights were the technology of the 1880s. Smart homes and the “internet of things” are the technology of today. The common thread in the original movie and Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door is that in each, the victim’s home, the place where she should feel safest in the world, is used as a weapon against her.

That sense of unease occurs in the first scene in Madwoman, when Jane’s neighbor approaches her and begs, “I want you to figure out if I’m crazy.”movies.

Readers: What do you think about security systems and the “internet of things?” Are you participating in that universe or staying away from it?

Comment below to be entered to win a copy of Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door. Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door was released on October 27, exclusively in paper and exclusively from Barnes & Noble for one year. The first book in the series, Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody is available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats from all retailers. You can find out more about it here.

Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries and the Jane Darrowfield Mysteries. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Barbara’s Maine Clambake novellas are included along with stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis in holiday anthologies from Kensington Publishing. Barbara and her husband live in Portland, Maine. Readers can visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com