Cover Matters is a new monthly feature in which we examine the medium that is first contact between a reader and a book: the cover. This feature will dedicate more separate space to a topic that has always intrigued, irked, and befuddled us. We will be talking about issues such as whitewashing practices, covers in poor taste, misleading or completely inaccurate covers, clichéd covers and, of course, covers that manage to get it right. We plan on having guests (bloggers, authors, cover artists, and publishers if possible) join us for these monthly pieces, with the following question in mind: Do covers matter?

In this first issue, we will be examining the practice of whitewashing of covers. We begin by taking a look at a few examples of Whitewashing over the ages, following up with an examination of the rationales justifying this practice. We proceed to talk about problems of whitewashing, as this form of discrimination has much broader implications in not only the publishing and book world, but in the real world as well. We finally conclude the post with a call for awareness and a guest article by the eloquent and passionate Ari from Reading in Color.

Introduction:

In books, to whitewash is to use a white representation for a character that is not white. If you have been anywhere near the wonderful world of book blog internetting for the past few months you are probably aware of two major cover fiascos, in which publishing house Bloomsbury used white models on covers to represent non-white protagonists. After the huge online outcry the covers of Liar by Justine Larbalestier and of Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore were retreated and replaced:

As much as we, and probably the rest of the world (as some of the comments we have seen point to), would like to think that these are only but sporadic, isolated incidents, unfortunately this is not so. The practice has been going on for a long, long time, and it is not confined to one genre or one race, nor is it solely an American issue, either:

Example 1: Octavia Butler’s Dawn

Dawn is the first book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series and her protagonist Lilith Iyapo (the standing woman in the cover to your left), is described as “an imposing black woman” (quote from NK Jemisin’s article). The first cover published in 1987 was replaced with the cover on the right in the 1997 edition, 10 years later.

Example 2: Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet and Powers

Ursula Le Guin is a Fantasy author known for writing multiracial characters. Her Earthsea quartet for example features dark-skinned characters, however early books depict white-skinned ones on the covers.

Similarly, the arc of her 2007 release Powers, which features a POC as the main character, was distributed with the cover on the left. Thankfully, the publishers fixed the mistake in time for the release.

Example 3: LA Banks’ Crimson Moon Books

The Crimson Moon books features a protagonist who is half-creole, half African-American and the four covers in the series are completely all over the place in portraying said protagonist. The latest cover is the only one that comes close to Sasha’s honey, darker skin tone.

Example 4: Cherry Cheva’s She’s So Money

The protagonist of this 2008 book is Asian (Thai to be more precise).

Example 5: Esther Friesner’s Sphinx’s Princess

This 2009 novel and 2010 sequel, about Nefertiti, the Egyptian Queen has a very white, European looking model on its covers.

Example 6: The Dragon and The Stars Anthology

This anthology edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, and featuring fantasy, myth, and science fiction stories by and about ethnic Chinese writers from around the world – including Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Canada and the United States….and it has a European Dragon on the cover. (Never mind the fact that the book isn’t even about dragons)

Example 7: German cover of NK Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

The protagonist of this fantastic novel is thus described:

I am short and flat and brown as forestwood, and my hair is a black-curled mess. Because I find it unmanageable otherwise, I wear it short. I am sometimes mistaken for a boy.

So who is the person depicted in the cover of the German version?

According to the author, the German editor has declared that the woman in the cover is not meant to depict anyone in the book. It is a random person. She has been advised:

by other pro authors that this sort of thing — art that’s got nothing to do with the book — is common among foreign publishers, who go in more for “symbolic” rather than “representative”/”realistic” like us USians prefer.

We remain baffled as to how a blonde, random woman in lieu of a dark-skinned woman could “symbolise” anything other than racism. This is a choice and a choice that brings us to the point of this post.

“Explaining” Whitewashing

The most dominant rationale we have seen for justifying whitewashing of covers (and movies, etc) is the simplistic argument:

We have a few problems with this argument. First, we should disclose that we do NOT have any hard data (although if anyone does have access to sales figures, we’d love to hear from you), and as such, we must deal with largely anecdotal and other secondary evidence.

That said, it seems to us that the argument that the statement, “PoC Covers Don’t Sell” seems more than a little disingenuous. First off, there aren’t very many books with PoC representation on the covers out in the market to begin with! Check out one informal survey done by a blogger cited at Racebending.com, in which a paltry 2% of 775 YA books looked at had PoC on the covers. This is a small sample, but from our experience, it feels pretty representative. Go into the YA or SF/F section of your book store and take a look at the covers. We’re betting about 2% of those covers depict a PoC (if that). In this sense, yes, PoC covers don’t sell…but that probably has something to do with the fact that there aren’t any significant number of them out there. And while we’re on the argument that covers with PoC on them do not sell, take a look at the July issue of Italian Vogue. The issue, in the midst of a huge slump in advertising and sales for fashion magazines, sold out completely in the USA and UK, causing a rush second printing of 40,000 copies. This hot-selling, record breaking issue was the “Black Issue” and only featured black models. For a relatively small circulation magazine, this is huge news. While we know that matching book publishing to magazine publishing is an apples to oranges comparison, we do think it’s an interesting trend to at least note.

Following and related to the argument that POC-cover books will not sell, the second major argument we have seen in the rationale for whitewashing covers is:

There’s a whole lot wrong with this argument. First, it assumes that the majority of “readers” are white. We live in a very diverse world – in the United States alone, over 38% of the population is a race other than white (according to the American Community Survey Demographic & Housing Estimates from 2006-2008, and separating “Hispanic/Latino” from the “white” classification). Demographics aside, this argument is also flawed as it assumes that readers can only relate to books about characters that are similar to themselves. What does that say about books with vampires or werewolves or blue aliens on the covers? Is the message, then, that readers can eagerly relate to these covers and these different species’ of characters – but cannot relate to something so removed as another human of a different race? What does this say of PoC audiences that read books with predominantly white protagonists? This argument implies that they either have more mental fortitude and adaptive prowess than their white brothers and sisters, or that their being able to relate to white characters simply isn’t as important than whites being able to relate to non-whites. Any way you cut it, it’s insulting to all those involved.

Besides the Young Adult category/genre, we’ve seen this argument of non-relatability applied especially in the romance field – in particular, with African-American Romance. Attempts at “Crossover Marketing” (Marketing African-American Romance in the Romance section as opposed to segregating it to the A-A Section) were met with this brand of criticism, for example from the Arlington Morning News (from aalbc.com):

In an Arlington Morning News story about crossover marketing of African-American romances, a magazine publisher indicated that the covers, which show Blacks in Afrocentric styles, might make white readers uncomfortable.

“There are many people who might see the covers of the books, which often feature women with braids or short kinky cuts and men with clean-shaven heads and dark skin, as being too black and in-your-face” She went on to suggest covers without people.

As we’ve said before, this is a problem that pervades the publishing industry, across genres. Again, the same assumption presupposes this reporter’s argument (a white person is not too white for PoC readers, but PoC characters are too “colored” and “in-your-face” for white readers). The point is, these sorts of assumptions about white and PoC readers are insulting to ALL involved – to both persons of color, and white readers alike.

Problems & Implications of Whitewashing

The problems inherent in whitewashing of covers extends much further than a mere book. The practice is indicative of a larger problem that is prevalent in the publishing world, and in our own world, as readers and humans. Even before a cover is placed on a book and may be whitewashed, there are numerous obstacles and problems that face PoC writers. You may have noticed that many books with PoC protagonists are written by white authors, especially in the YA arena. In fact, the whole impetus for our “Cover Matters” posts were two such books – both Liar and Magic Under Glass are books with PoC protagonists, and are written by white authors. According to statistics taken from the Children’s Cooperative Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this trend is the norm:

We want to make it very clear that we think that it is TOTALLY awesome that white authors write about POC. We want diversity! We live in a diverse world, we want diverse characters that represent the real world! Justine Larbalestier has written a great article about why her protagonists aren’t white, that we encourage everyone to read.

However, the discrepancy between books written about PoC and by PoC is interesting, and also worthy of note. Take, for example, Mary Anne Mohanraj’s experience with “The Red Sari” phenomenon for her Bodies In Motion cover. Ms. Mohanraj explains:

My original cover was an ‘artsy, literary’ cover, but under market pressure, the cover was changed to an image of a brown-skinned woman with wet skin, wrapped in a red sari. I had heard that this was common for the covers of S. Asian books, so I eventually decided to do some research and see if that was actually the case.

Ms. Mohanraj put together a presentation of her findings for the 2008 SALA Conference in San Francisco, which you can read about online here: South Asian & Diaspora Book Covers.

For another perspective, we’d also like to call your attention to a post by POC author Neesha Meminger, “Who Gets to Represent”. Of her experiences, Ms. Meminger says:

When white authors write characters of colour, their careers are not hindered. In fact, they may get the traditional pat-on-the-back response whenever the privileged represent those they have privilege over. When authors of colour write books featuring white protagonists and all-white casts, their careers are not negatively impacted. I am not applauded or thanked when I write white characters in my books because I am expected to.

Certainly a valid point. She then goes on to say:

When authors of colour dare to feature protagonists of colour, or people their books primarily with characters of colour, our challenges to getting published are vast. If we do somehow manage to get published, our books are “educational,” or about race and “other”-ness — and we are almost never lead titles. Many of us struggle to get a second book published (Mitali Perkins waited over ten years to have her second book published), and to get the marketing and publicity support we need to reach our audience. (This last bit is probably true for the majority of authors, regardless of race or background, but it is definitely compounded for PoC).

So, What Can We Do?

Whitewashing of covers is a problem. It is a concrete, visual representation that can be held in our hands, of a much larger moral and social problem, namely: Racism. If you think that we are exaggerating, that covers don’t matter, that what matter are the stories inside a book, that this is the 21st century after all and we all have come a long way, perhaps you should consider the following:

- Most of the examples given above happened in the past 5 years, some of them are happening right now.

Whitewashing is not something that is relegated to the book industry either to wit:

- In 2008, L’Oréal was accused of Whitewashing Beyonce on their advertisement on an issue of Elle Magazine.

- The 2010 movie Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is based on a Nickelodeon’s cartoon and is “set in a fantastical Asian world,” depicting a multicultural world and multicultural characters. However, the casting of the movie is largely Caucasian – for the heroes, that is. The villains, however, are represented by PoC.

- Last Friday it hit the news that Gerard Depardieu will be playing the role of Alexandre Dumas in a new movie about the writer who was of mixed race and suffered racism when he was alive. Gerard Depardieu had to “darken his skin and wear a curly wig” to play the role.

And the list goes on.

So, the question we need to ask ourselves is this: what can we do about all of this mess? There is no easy solution for this of course – you can’t make a racist, not racist. You can’t make people who think they won’t relate to a PoC in a cover of book or a magazine, or in the lead role of a movie change their minds.

Where to start?

Awareness is important. Be aware of cover issues, for example, and don’t deny that there is a problem (i.e. “marketing departments are so busy, maybe this is not a racist issue at all”). Be aware that there is such a thing as White Privilege, and what exactly it means (check out this article from The Story Siren on her experience with White Privilege). There will a whole bunch of links at the end of this article as well, and we highly recommend you read them.

If you want to actively do something, you can start by reading more books by PoC, about PoC and with PoC on the covers – and the numbers will start to change. Check out the PoC Reading Challenge or join the Readers Against Whitewashing Facebook Page.

Publishers: if you are publishing a book about a PoC, OWN IT. Like for example, Simon and Schuster and Angry Robot are two publishers that are publishing great books about and by PoC with great covers too.

The truth is this: if we just sit back and let it pass, we will still be seeing whitewashing in the 22nd century and beyond.

And this is what we have to say on the subject; we admit we got carried away. The more we read, the more interested we became, and the post ended being more of an essay than anything else. We have learnt a lot in the process, we might even have shed a tear or two reading articles and watching videos at Racebending ( a site we highly recommend you all to check it out, it is eye-opening).

To finalise, we would like to give the floor to Ari, from Reading in Color. She is the teenager who wrote that amazing letter to Bloomsbury when the Magic Under Glass cover debacle occurred, and her words have inspired several articles and blogs about the subject. We asked Ari: Do Covers Matter?

Covers Matter

A huge thank you to Ana and Thea for inviting me to express my opinions here at The Book Smugglers. Like most bloggers I love to talk, rant, discuss and listen so I’m excited for this new feature they will be having called Cover Matters because it’s an important topic and one that we need to talk about.

I think YA book covers (I mostly read YA so I can’t compare my thoughts on this subject to adult fiction book covers) have lots of problems (skinny models vs. overweigh models, boys vs. girls, headless people, etc.) However, in this post I want to focus solely on whitewashed covers because they are the most distressing of all covers.

If you follow the book blogging world, especially the YA blogosphere then you have undoubtedly heard all about the Liar and Magic Under Glass cover controversy. A brief refresher: Bloomsbury USA whitewashed both covers of these books. That means that, although the books were about African American (in Liar the main character, Micah is biracial) or “dark-skinned” (the main character, Nimira in Magic Under Glass is described as such) girls, the covers had white models on them. This is wrong, pure and simple. The whitewashing of covers has been an eye opener to many in the blogging community.

The message a whitewashed cover sends is that POC are worthless, that we mean so little that even if a book is written about us, we can’t be on the cover because the image of a POC won’t sell. Even if a book is about a certain topic, the cover can be completely different from the story as long as it sells. Now I want everyone to step back and think about this. Are you back? Is that not completely ridiculous? For all the “color blind “folks, let’s take color out of the equation. It would be like having a vampire on the cover of a book about a witch or a dog on the cover of a book about a horse, etc (except it’s 100x worse to whitewash a cover). Wouldn’t you be mad or at the very least puzzled? POC can read about white people, that’s “normal” and expected. But ask some white people to read about a POC and it’s a problem, “there aren’t many books about POC in my favorite genre” or “I don’t see color so I shouldn’t have to alter my reading habits.” I admit that I always thought it obvious as to why whitewashed covers are wrong, but I received a rude awakening when I started reading comments on other blogs that said things like “so?” or “I don’t really care because I don’t see color. I just read the story if it sounds good.” This is troubling for a few reasons.

First, the idea of “not seeing color” is ridiculous and sad. It’s sad because we live in a colorful world, with people who are all different shades. If you don’t “see color” then to me, you are saying I don’t recognize the beauty of all people who are of different hues. People come in all different colors and we should see this beauty and appreciate, not ignore it. If you’re white, you are colorless to a certain degree but that’s not bad! I certainly don’t think white people should feel bad for being white or pale (ugh don’t get me started on tanning! Tanning beds are one of the creepiest things in this world), everyone should be accepting of their own skin color as well as others.

I understand the intention behind “not seeing color”. This mindset states that you only judge a book based on the story within the pages, not on the cover. The idea being that you will read any book that appeals to you and that therefore you are not narrow-minded because you would read a book about a person of color (POC) it just hasn’t been written yet. As if, once a book is written in your favorite genre and it’s about a POC, it will magically appear in your local bookstore or library and you will pick it up. Naturally, this is completely ridiculous. I’m willing to bet that those who claim to be color blind own books with mostly white faces on the cover. This may not be intentional on their part, but since they don’t see color, they limit themselves from searching for books that have color in them and they don’t protest the lack of color and cultural diversity in books.

There are not many YA books out there about people of color so you have to make a conscious effort to look for them. When I was a young reader, I just read the most popular books, the ones everyone was reading (Beverly Cleary, Harry Potter, etc.) but I realized something really fast: the popular books rarely involved people who looked like me, or who came from different cultural backgrounds than the white norm. It wasn’t fair. I wanted to see more books about POC, but when I wandered the shelves of my local bookstores, I didn’t see very many, maybe one or two. This bothered me for a while, but I didn’t decide to do anything till I was older, getting ready to start high school. I started to do research. I looked up titles and authors who were/wrote about POC and armed with this knowledge, I headed back into bookstores. If the books weren’t there, I asked for them to be ordered. Oftentimes these books were in obscure locations that I wouldn’t have thought to look, more often than not though, my bookstore just didn’t carry them but they were always happy to order them for me. If I was color blind, I never would have done this. I would have kept reading the books that I saw prominently on display in my bookstores and libraries, books that did not have POC on them and/or were not about POC.

POC do not get on covers. I suppose this is because somewhere publishing companies have statistics (or have at least noticed trends) that show that people are more likely to read about white people than POC and that covers with white people sell better than covers with POC. This places the blame of the lack of POC on covers solely on the consumers. If we start buying more books with POC on the covers, publishing companies will put more of them on the cover and publish more books about POC. Also, why do some white people not want to read about POC? It’s important for families and teachers to talk about the importance of having tolerance for other cultures. Tolerance is developed from reading about cultures different from your own. BUT if we consumers don’t see many books with POC on the cover, we will continue to buy books with white people on the cover (and if we don’t see color, we won’t give this a second thought) and a whole generation of leaders will have grown up without reading about and respecting other cultures and then it’s the publishing companies fault. It’s a vicious cycle and instead of pointing fingers and blaming the publishing companies or the readers, let’s talk about how we can change the minds of both publishing companies AND readers. We can do this by buying books with POC on the cover and books that are about/by POC. This will send a message to publishing companies, that we don’t care who is on the cover, as long as the story is good, therefore, publish more books about people of color. If your book blog is dedicated to a certain genre, then start making an effort to read and review books in that genre that feature POC. We can send messages to our fellow readers by talking up the books about/by people of color, if you have a blog, you have a computer, so there are no excuses for not being able to find books about POC (Google anyone?) Reviewing books about POX does not mean we praise every single book about/by a POC. There is no free pass just for writing about a diverse group of characters (especially if they aren’t authentic), we should hold all books to the same standards; are they well written? Entertaining? Meaningful? It’s just an added bonus when the cast is multicultural.

Covers matter because they are the first thing (or one of the first things) that attracts us to a book. When you see a cover that is so unique, so breathtaking, laugh out loud funny or just plain weird, that gets your attention and draws you to the book. As a POC, seeing a cover with a POC on it, draws me in. I will pick up ANY book with a POC on it (and then read the summary to see if I actually want to read it) because sometimes I get tired of reading about blondes, brunettes,and feisty redheads (*eye roll* Why can’t you be a feisty blonde? or black-haired girl?) with blue, green or hazel eyes. People of color deserve to see images of themselves reflected on book covers, especially young readers. As children and teens of color grow we need to see ourselves reflected on book covers and in books to re-affirm that we are special and valuable because we don’t always get that reassurance from TV/movies, magazines or those around us which provides a crushing blow to self-esteem. I am one of many young people of color who at one point or antoher wanted to be white and cursed the fact that not only do I look different from everyone else, but I rarely see images of people who look like me in the media. That is a sad reality and conclusion to come to and I sincerely hope that in a small way, my blog along with others will help promote the works of POC enough that the next generation (regardless of skin color) will grow up with POC on book covers and will pick up the book without giving it a second thought except being excited about the story on the pages. When young readers (including myself) see POC on book covers, we get a boost of self-esteem and feel triumphant, happy in the knowledge that people will be walking around with a POC on a book cover (for a little while at least). They are seeing in color and will come to realize (if they haven’t already), that we all have some common experiences and trials regardless of skin color. It’s an eye-catching cover indeed that can convey all that with just one image of a POC.

People have already stepped up and begun working to promote books by/about POC. Check out Color Online, theHappyNappyBookseller, Crazy Quilts, Multiculturalism Rocks!, Gal Novelty, Asia on the Heart,World on the Mind, Bookish Blather, Good Books & Good Wine and the POC Reading Challenge. Oh and if you stop by my blog that would be pretty cool too and maybe, just maybe, it would be a great resource

Thank you, Ari!

Referenced Articles/Links for Further Reading:

N.K. Jemisin’s take on her German Cover

Justine Larbalestier’s article on the creation of book covers

Racebending.com’s take on whitewashing in YA novels

The Guardian UK’s article, “Fashion world stunned by Vogue for black” by Sarah Mower

American Community Survey Demographic & Housing Estimates (2006-2008)

aalbc.com’s article on African American Romance: “It’s All About Love: Romance Readers Speak Out” by Gwendolyn E. Osborne

Children’s Books by and about People of Color Published in the United States; Statistics Gathered by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Justine Larbalestier’s article on why her protagonists aren’t white

An Analysis of South Asian & Diaspora Book Covers by Mary Anne Mohanraj

Neesha Meminger’s article on writing and publishing as a POC author, “Who Gets to Represent”

The Happy Nappy Booksellet thank you to Simon and Schuster’s POC covers

A Centralised article about Avatar: The Last Airbender from Racebending

Ursula LeGuin’s article on Slate.com about Whitewashing Earthsea

BBC News’ article about Alexander Dumas biopic and ensuing outcry

Today, for our last guest of the season, we have the incomparable Katie(babs) of Babbling About Books, And More!. Katie has decided to write a little bit about some of the scariest places to visit, in Travel Channel fashion!

Without further ado, we give you the lovely KB!

When the Spooky Book Smugglers asked for me to join in on their scary Halloween Week, I was stumped on what to post about. In the past I have talked about my favorite scary books and movies, so thinking of something totally different to post was difficult. (even though I had about a month to think about it *blush*).

Along my blog and website hopping across the internet I found myself at Travelchannel.com and their post on the Top 10 Creepiest Places. This list is the most frightening places in the world:

10. Bermuda Triangle
9. Haunted Hollywood
8. Tower of London
7. Mutter Museum of Medical History
6. Gettysburg
5. New Orleans
4. Salem
3. Roswell
2. Winchester Mystery House
1. Lizzie Borden Bed-and- Breakfast

Out of the 10 here, I have visited 4 of these places. I guess you can assume I haven’t been to the Bermuda Triangle because I would probably be stuck on some alternative island universe ala the show Lost. (Not that I wouldn’t mind being a beach bump with either Matthew Fox or Josh Holloway.)

The Tower of London is filled with so much history, over one-thousand year’s worth! Unfortunately I didn’t see any ghosts walking around with their heads in their hands. Salem is a bit cheesy and corny but still a fun time and Gettysburg, PA is very tragic and spooky because as you look down on the battlefield where the North and South fought the most deadly battle of the Civil War, chills wrack your whole body because the ghost of that battle and the dead, their residual energy still remains. There is also this wonderful Wine Festival in September there that I also recommend you go to if you have the chance.

But the one place I wanted to specifically point out is number 2 on this list. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA is an amazing structure that may or may not be haunted!

Why is the Winchester House such a creepy place? The house is full of rooms with stairs and doors to nowhere! You open a door and there is a wall. Stairs lead up toward the ceiling. It is a winding labyrinth with rooms that make no sense.

I even walked up one set of stairs and bumped my head on the low ceiling. O.o

The story behind the Winchester House is pretty sad. The reason the house was built this way is because:

“When rifle heiress Sarah Winchester began building her Victorian-style mansion in 1884, she pledged that the construction would never end during her lifetime. The reason? She thought the continuous noise would appease the ghosts that plagued her after the deaths of her husband and daughter as well as help her attain eternal life.”

“Sarah Winchester built a home that is an architectural marvel. Unlike most homes of its era, this 160-room Victorian mansion had modern heating and sewer systems, gas lights that operated by pressing a button, three working elevators, and 47 fireplaces.”

The Winchester House is not a house of horror but a wonderful and marvelous mansion full of bizarre features and oddities. The rumors still persist that the victims killed by Winchester rifles haunt the house that was never finished, roaming the halls, confused because of the stairs and doors that lead to nowhere.

Out of the 10 creepy places mentioned, which ones have you been to? How about some places that aren’t mention that you may have visited that should be placed on this list? And if you have been in the Bermuda Triangle and lived to tell about it, do they have a island happy hour there?

Thanks again, Katie!

For today’s guest, we are very lucky to have young adult authors Diana Peterfreund (of Rampant fame) and Carrie Ryan (genius behind YA zombie novel, The Forest of Hands and Teeth) over to guest blog. For their topic, they’ve decided to write about another young adult author: The Awesomeness That Is Christopher Pike.

Please give it up for the lovely Diana and Carrie!

Hi, we’re Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth) and Diana Peterfreund (Rampant). Our first teen novels came out this year. They’re filled with supernatural horror and teenage girls who must fight for their lives – sort of like the novels we read and loved when we were younger… the novels of Christopher Pike. In honor of Halloween, we decided to have a Pike reminiscence and love-fest. This is the conversation that transpired.

Diana: My favorite Pikes were MONSTER, SEE YOU LATER, and MASTER OF MURDER.

Carrie: Your memory is so much better than mine.

Diana: Just because I’m LOOKING at them. I have a stack of them here on my desk.

Carrie: I wish I’d gotten my box of books. I’m sure just holding them would make me remember. I read these books on weekends, staying up until 3am usually because I HAD TO KNOW what happened.

Diana: Yeah, me too. I remember Monster kept me up all night, and I kept trying to convince myself it was just fiction, so I could go to sleep without thinking that vampires from outer space were going to come eat me.

Carrie: Oh, that’s right! His vampires were from outer space!

Diana: And India. He had those vampires too. That’s actually the one they’re reissuing and is on the bestseller lists right now: THE LAST VAMPIRE, with the sexy immortal blonde girl vampire from India. Not MONSTER, with the crazy bat-like alien vampires.

Carrie: Those books taught me to speed read. [Carrie goes online to look up old favorites.] It’s interesting to read this flap copy now.

Diana: Why is that?

Carrie: His plots – the descriptions – don’t seem as complex as I remember: “Kid goes on vacation, someone dies, haunting ensues.” But I remember the stories being so fantastically unique. They were SO beyond anything else I was reading or thought about.

Diana: I wonder how much of that was that they were going to tone down anything that seemed out of the ordinary, for marketing purposes. I love the covers. Neon candy colors with blood dripping from the fonts – but not girly, even with all the pink. All these gorgeous paintings of girls with long glossy hair in jeans and sweaters standing with boys in jean jackets pulling them to safety. (Even though the girls could take damn good care of themselves.)

Carrie: Oh yeah, the covers bring back TONS of memories.

Diana: Is there any Pike book you specifically want to talk about?

Carrie: What’s the one with the bad coke? [note: that’s the one where someone was forcing people to snort bad cocaine and killing them]

Diana: DIE SOFTLY.

Carrie: I wonder whether you could have a book like that now. I can’t remember at the time if I was appalled by the story line – I doubt it. I think today there might be issues with it being too dark or edgy (or, would it be considered a problem novel). And I also wonder if it would fly in terms of plausibility. The chick’s killing people by making them snort it (duct tape over their mouth).

Diana: Yes! That was freaky. “Say no to drugs, kids.”

Carrie: I remember that ending with him setting up a camera in his closet and AS HE’S DYING he hears the photo shutter. Of all the books, that’s what stands out in my mind because I never saw that coming and I thought it was so brilliant, because the chick would have gotten away otherwise. Now, I wonder if readers would think “Oh, they’d find the tape residue on his mouth,” because they watch so much CSI.  I wonder if today you have to be hyper aware of forensics and stuff like that. I NEVER thought about those types of things when I first read the books but maybe today’s teens would.

Diana: That’s a good point. It was weird how sometimes he’d write thrillers with no paranormal elements, and sometimes they’d be supernatural. And sometimes they’d start out as thriller/mysteries and then BECOME supernatural in the sequels. Like, I loved CHAIN LETTER but then I thought the sequel kind of went off the rails.

Carrie: Oh, I forgot about that one! The best thing about CHAIN LETTER is that there were actual Chain Letters out there – I remember getting them. Not this email nonsense – real letters with stamps.

Diana: I still remember how scary that was, especially in the sequel, where the supernatural came in. How you moved your name up on the list, and then once you were at the top of the list, your name went into the box. “Once you are in the box, you stay in the box.” that line was so scary, I remember it more than a decade later.

Carrie: See what I mean about memory?

Diana: Because – spoiler warning — the box was hell.

Carrie: Maybe you didn’t like the sequels as much because it’s that initial figuring out the world that’s so interesting with him.

Diana: His worldbuilding was fascinating. It was always so Californian and had that New Age flare, too—biofeedback machines and reincarnations, etc. So different from what I was used to in Florida.

Carrie: And me in South Carolina. It sort of gave it an even more otherworldly aspect.

Diana: We two southern girls living vicariously through the liberal woo woo Californians in Pike novels!

Carrie: LOL. But I never felt like I couldn’t “get it.”

Diana: I didn’t even have cheerleaders at my high school, let alone sociopathic coke dealing ones.

Carrie: I was a cheerleader at my school – haha!!

Diana: Did you deal coke?

Carrie: No, not so much.

Diana: Did you sell cookies? That was their cover.

Carrie: I made stupid plastic cups filled with candy for the football players.

Diana: Close enough!  I guess I must have read a lot of these in middle school, because had I tried in high school, I might have gone, wow, why does everyone have boyfriends in this!

Carrie: The other thing I really like about Pike is the games he plays with the narratives. It’s a question of who is telling the story and when. There are a lot where it’s the cop interrogating people later on.

Diana: Oh yeah. I loved that. The first-person narratives in REMEMBER ME, where she’s dead, and in THE LAST VAMPIRE, were very powerful. Who is telling DIE SOFTLY? Herb, right? But he dies.

Carrie: Just because someone was narrating didn’t mean they’d make it at the end, which, from an author standpoint, is fascinating. It’s also something I love about writing YA because as an adult I wonder if I’d find something like that trite because I’d seen it before? But there’s always got to be that first time and that’s the BEST feeling – when you’re reading and for the first time to realize that your narrator can die.

Diana: Do you have something to tell us, Carrie?

Carrie: About my characters dying? LOL. That’s what I love about writing for teens. It’s always new for them.

Diana: All those little narrative tricks. Unreliability, killing off the protagonist, story-within-a-story (which he does in so, so many of the books, ROAD TO NOWHERE, THE MIDNIGHT CLUB, WHISPER OF DEATH)… Pike kills off a lot of people in his books. No one was safe.

Carrie: I love how he sort of took these ordinary things we all knew – chain letters, scavenger hunts – and then made them horrific.

Diana: That’s where I always thought horror is scariest. That’s what Stephen King does so well, Dogs, cars, trucks, sink drains, cornfields….

Carrie: I learned not to pick up hitchhikers from Christopher Pike.

Diana: Ha! That was ROAD TO NOWHERE. Awesome cover. Chick with a skeleton hitchhiker in her car.

Carrie: I think reading Pike then expanded my understanding of how far authors could go. It’s exactly what you said – no one’s safe, which I think added to the thriller aspect. I mean, there’s a comfort in reading a romance where you know things are going to work out, you just don’t know how. They’re still page turners because it’s the figuring out how that’s fascinating, but with Pike… all bets were off.

Diana: And so many of his books started out with death. Just reading the descriptions people are dealing with the death of someone in the group…their murder, their suicide.

Carrie: They always are. Do you think that was a choice he made cause he was writing thriller and death is an easy thriller choice? Or do you think he was trying to deal with something more?

Diana: He wrote one from the perspective of a serial killer—Dexter before Dexter. THE WICKED HEART. I think it’s a way of saying these teens are already in danger, they’ve already seen darkness. Usually the past death is connected to whatever is going on. It’s the inciting incident, from a storytelling perspective.

Carrie: I wonder if I would have read them differently if I’d dealt with something like death as a teen. Because as a reader, I got to hold those stories out at arm’s length.

Diana: That’s a really good question. I don’t know if you see books like this for teens anymore, where they aren’t called “problem novels.”

Carrie: Me neither. It’s more common to see books that deal with suicide be more in the vein of THIRTEEN REASONS WHY.

Diana: So many of the Pike characters have best friends or exes that committed suicide too, but instead of sitting in a diner listening to tapes, they are fighting the killer vampires from outer space.

Carrie: Or being haunted… literally. Hmmm, I was about to say that that’s because the books aren’t about the suicide, but aren’t they? I mean, dealing with a literal ghost of the dead person… isn’t that just a stand in for how people deal with suicide and death? He just makes it literal?

Diana: True. You could probably write an excellent comparison paper between 13 REASONS and Pike’s WHISPER OF DEATH.  They are both about a teen girl suicide whose last act on Earth is to arrange a post-mortem payback for the people she blames for her death. Hannah of 13 Reasons does it with tapes. Betty Sue in Whisper does it by magically creating a parallel dimension in which she horrifically kills the people who made her suffer in life.

Carrie: Huh, that’s really interesting to think about. Just looked on the Amazon website – for Whisper of Death they have the reading level at ages 4-8… er… no

Diana: Really? That book STARTS with an abortion. And then this one guy, Helter Skelter — I’ll never forget it – is walking on this wall that turns into a razorblade and splits him in two.

Carrie: Ugh – that’s very Saw.

Diana: That book actually IS very Saw, now that I think about it. It’s very horror porn — the horrific killings. Now, people might say some of the stuff in his books was way too old for middle schoolers, which is mostly when I read it. I never even thought of it. Rape and murder and abortions and coke dealers. I read them at 11, 12, and people are saying “oh, this is 14 or 15 and up” now.

Carrie: I never thought any of it was too mature for me.

Diana: Or maybe people were saying it then too and because I was a kid, I never heard it.

Carrie: It never freaked me out – except for late at night when I needed to know how it ended.

Diana: It freaked me out, but then again, I’m a wimp. As for horrific deaths, there are some in Suzanne Collins that are just as horrific…the wasps, the mutts, etc. The more things change….

Carrie: Good point.

Diana: Pike’s books were always thrillers, and sometimes they were supernatural thrillers, which at the time was called horror. It’s like how now they call books “dark fantasy” what might have been called horror. Like your book. I’ve also seen reviews of Rampant that call it horror.

Carrie: Really? I never saw it that way.

Diana: It’s kind of how when chick lit was popular, people would try to call any sort of women’s fiction chick lit. Sometimes, with these old Pikes, you had to read the book before you knew if it was supernatural or not. That’s another thing they don’t do now. That and let books with all that death slide without being a Book About Death. Though I guess your book starts with deaths.

Carrie: True, but I don’t think of it as a problem novel.

Diana: Well, THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH isn’t even set in our world. Pike’s novels were always set in OUR WORLD.

Carrie: Which made it easier for them to at once seem real and accessible, but still didn’t feel like it was going to happen to ME, which kept that horror at a distance.

Diana: You don’t think it would be more at a distance if it was set in another world? That’s what scares me about the “normal” horror – I’ve been in a rest stop bathroom, I’ve been in the house with the lights off. This could happen to me. I’ve never lived in a religious compound in the zombie-infested forest after the apocalypse.

Carrie: No?

Diana: I remember making the conscious choice to start RAMPANT like a horror movie. Babysitter, boyfriend, monster in the woods.

Carrie: I’m not sure I even saw all that but it’s true. Wow, I’m shocked I missed that.

Diana: Me too. And grumpy. There was also a lot of meta in Pike novels. Like he would have his characters go to see a movie based on another of his books, or he would have them mention his other books. For instance, the characters in FALL INTO DARKNESS were inspired by reading GIMME A KISS, and the writer in MASTER OF MURDER seemed to have written FALL INTO DARKNESS. That was another favorite, actually. MASTER OF MURDER was about a teenage bestselling horror novelist and no one knew it was him, including his crush, who was a huge fan. Such fantasy wish fulfillment for me!

Carrie: I loved reading books about people in publishing.

Diana: I wonder how many aspiring teen writers reading that book got the totally wacked out idea that they could be a secret novelist and no one but their agent would ever know their true identity. I know I suspected Pike was really some 17 year old kid when I read that particular book.

Carrie: Oh, I’m totally sure of that. I even remember another book that was basically the same idea: popular genre writer with a pen name and the book they’re talking about in the book is the book you’re reading (wait… was that too convoluted of an explanation?)  I totally felt like reading Pike is what got me to not only love books, but love the idea of writing.

Diana: I actually met Pike’s longtime agent this summer at a cocktail party and I totally monopolized her telling her what an inspiration Pike was to me.

Carrie: Yeah, I remember you calling me right after that happened.  I felt the same way when I met RL Stine (which is who I read after Pike).  I spent most of the time around him being stunned and wanting to tell him just how much of an influence he was on me. Do you think your writing now is influenced by Pike?

Diana: I do, especially when it comes to characters making plans. Pike wrote characters who thought things out and made these elaborate schemes. You’d have chapter after chapter of the character going “Okay, this is how I’m going to fake my death/kill the alien vampires infesting my town/whatever. I’m going here and I’m getting this harness and I’m building this kind of bomb that will throw me clear…” And it was always so interesting, watching the plans come together, watching them work or fail or backfire. Nothing came easy for the Pike characters. They really had to work for it, and there were dangers and consequences of messing up.

Carrie: That is totally so true and I think that’s what I’ve taken from him – how things can just get worse and worse and you never know what the consequences could be — nothing was taken off the table (death, dismemberment, happily ever after).  That’s what really kept me reading: I just never knew what would happen.

You know it’s just sort of funny to find ourselves here as critique partners, having grown up in totally different places and yet both loving Christopher Pike and both being influenced by him/taking inspiration from him. Man, I really need to go get that box of Pike books out of my dad’s attic once I’m done with this deadline.

Diana: I was in the store the other day and his reissued vampire books (THIRST) are shelved next to RAMPANT because of our last names – Peterfreund and Pike. That seemed so incredible to me. I can’t imagine someone going up to 13 year old me in the Waldenbooks clutching a copy of REMEMBER ME and saying, “One day, you’re going to be right there on the shelf next to him.” And now I am.

Carrie: OMG that is just about the coolest thing ever! To be on a shelf next to Pike – heck being on any shelf in a store at all.  You’re totally right, my 13 year old self would have died (and my significantly older self still does die when I see my book near his!).  Thanks Mr. Pike!

Thank you, Diana and Carrie, for the fabulous post, and trip down memory lane! You’ve both inspired me to bust out my old Pikes for a Halloween re-read (luckily, I have them with me thanks to my sister):

Some of them are pretty tattered, but readable. And I’ve had them all these years, through multiple moves…so I’m proud of my Pike collection.

How about you? Any Christopher Pike books you love? Or any YA horror favorites you care to share?

Greetings, friends! Our next guest for Halloween Week is the lovely Kristen of Fantasy Cafe. Kristen isn’t much of a horror reader, but when we invited her over for the week, she was eager to give one of Thea’s favorite childhood authors, Christopher Pike, a try.

Ladies and gents, please give it up for Kristen, as she reviews Whisper of Death!

I have a confession to make: I’m a serious wuss when it comes to horror. Normally I avoid it like the plague due to childhood memories of being completely creeped out by anything the least bit spooky. When I was about six years old, I saw the movie Aliens and was terrified for at least a year. (This was around the time Alf was popular so my six-year-old self had learned to associate aliens with light-hearted and funny instead of horrifying before this movie scarred me for life.) Just the sound of the spooky Unsolved Mysteries music was enough to keep me wide-eyed and awake at night with the blankets pulled over my head.

For some reason I was in the mood to be adventurous and give horror another shot this Halloween. I mentioned to Thea that I could not remember reading a horror novel since reading R.L. Stine as a teenager so she kindly offered to send me a copy of Whisper of Death, one of her favorite novels by Christopher Pike, who was another popular YA horror novelist around the same time R.L. Stine was widely read. So one afternoon I settled in to read my first Christopher Pike novel, making sure to read it while it was bright and sunny out. Iím glad I did since its premise would have had me turning all the lights on and constantly looking over my shoulder if it was dark out, especially if it was eerily quiet too (not that eerily quiet happens often living in a college town).

The first couple of chapters describe the meeting of Roxanne and Pepper, who begin dating. Soon after that, Roxanne becomes pregnant so she and Pepper gather up some of their savings and head out of town early one morning to get an abortion. Once she and Pepper return to their hometown, Roxanne notices it is very quiet and she cannot even get a TV channel or radio station to come in. It almost seems as though she’s the only person left…

Roxanne becomes completely freaked out and runs around the town yelling and knocking on doors only to find she really does seem to be the only person in her neighborhood. Eventually, she meets up with Pepper in the center of town since he came to the same realization she did and tried to find somebody, anybody else in their town. They find they are the only inhabitants along with three other teenagers – a troublemaker, the smartest kid in the school, and a gorgeous and popular girl. After wracking their brains to try to figure out how they are connected, they realize it may be Betty Sue, a girl from their high school who recently committed suicide. Yet everybody seems rather secretive concerning her and those who are closest to her seem wary about discussing her in any detail. They go to Betty Sueís house anyway where they find some stories she has written – stories in which each of them dies.

Whisper of Death is a quick read and it is easy to fly through. The first couple of chapters didnít hook me since there was a lot of teenage angst and discussion about how hot Pepper looked (the story is all told from Roxanne’s perspective), which Iím not really a fan of. Once Roxanne discovered that most of the town seemed to have disappeared, the story really took off. At that point, I really wanted to know what happened next and how the death of Betty Sue and her stories tied together. I ended up reading the whole book in one afternoon.

This may be easy reading but there are some rather heavy, mature themes in this book, especially considering it was marketed as YA. Thatís not necessarily a bad thing, but I couldnít help thinking about how my mother would have died if she found out I was reading this book when I was a young adult. Not only does Roxanne have sex in it but she becomes pregnant, and there is some time spent on her agonizing over the decision of whether or not to keep the baby and how it will affect her life and Pepper’s.

Toward the end of the book, there was a sort of odd twist and it worried me that the book was going to have one of those cop-out “it was just a dream” endings. Fortunately, this was not the case and it was one of the most bizarre, twisted, wtf-inducing conclusions I can remember reading.

I had fun with my first foray into horror in years, but I wouldnít say Iím a convert to the genre yet. I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but once I put it down I found it fairly unsatisfying since it didnít stick with me for very long afterward. The messed-up way it ended did have me thinking about it for a little while, but I tend to remember the books where I really come to love the characters for the very longest. While Roxanne was likable and I had definite sympathy for her plight, I found myself focusing on what happens next instead of what happens to her and her friends, meaning my reaction once I finished was to think “fun book” but not “I want more right now!” Thatís not the fault of the book at all; itís just the way I am as a reader. I’m sure it wouldn’t be fair to judge all of horror as not being particularly character-driven based on one book, so feel free to recommend me some creepy books with great characters for next Halloween!

But anyway, back to the book now that I got the caveat about my personal preferences out of the way…

Whisper of Death is a great read for Halloween – it’s short enough to read in one sitting and is rather chilling. The brave can read it Halloween night but for someone easily spooked like me I’d recommend reading it during the day when your imagination isn’t likely to run away with you and creep you out.

6/10

Thank you Kristen! And we’re glad you enjoyed Whisper of Death!

For our next stop on Halloween Week, we have the fabulous paranormal romance/urban fantasy author Meljean Brook over for a guest post!

We are unabashed Meljean fangirls – so when we were inviting folks over for Halloween, she was one of the first names that came to mind. And, we were ecstatic when she agreed to put something together for our Halloween Celebration! Today, Meljean will be talking about Silver Bullet – the ’80s horror flick, starring Corey Haim and Gary Busey.

Without futher ado, please give it up for Meljean Brook!

Silver Bullet

Thanks to Ana and Thea for inviting me over for Halloween week! This is one of my favorite events at The Book Smugglers, so I’m thrilled to take part.

When Thea asked me what I wanted to do, the first thing that came to mind was writing a pseudo-review of Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, a 1985 werewolf movie produced by Dino De Laurentiis (Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Army of Darkness, and a bunch of other Stephen King-based movies) and directed by Daniel Attias (usually a TV director, including Buffy, Alias, House, and a gazillion other episodes of various shows.) I’d been thinking about Silver Bullet a lot lately, and how, when I was nine years old, I used to scare the crap out of myself walking home. We lived out in the boonies, and the driveway from the main road where the school bus dropped me off to our house wound through the woods (the Oregon kind, which are tons of tall fir trees surrounded by leafy underbrush that is very, very easy to hide in (I know this, because I used to hide in it and scare the crap out of my sisters and cousins when they had to walk the road at night)).

Anyway, I used to sprint down that drive in record time, certain that either a wendigo or the werewolf from Silver Bullet would leap out and kill me. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched it that young. But the truth is, there wasn’t any way I couldn’t watch it. If a movie was scary and I could sneak it past my parents, there was no holding me back.

The Basic Premise: Over the course of a summer, a werewolf terrorizes a small town in Maine (this is Stephen King, so of course it is.) One eleven-year-old boy, Marty Coslaw (played by the Corey of the Haim variety) and his sister, Jane (played by Megan Follows, best known for Anne of Green Gables) discover who the werewolf is and, with the help of their Uncle Red (Gary Busey, in what might be the perfect role), plan to kill it.

And I loved the movie. Sure, it scared the crap out of me, but I loved it. When I was 13, I read the novella it was based on – Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King – and aside from being intrigued by the structure of that novella, I don’t remember a single thing about it … but I remembered (quite fondly) many, many elements of the movie.

Would it hold up after twenty-three years, though? When I was nine, I didn’t make jokes about Corey Haim. When I was nine, the image of Gary Busey’s teeth weren’t yet burned in my brain. The two main characters – Marty and Uncle Red – are both played by actors whose Hollywood history and pop culture status is much, much bigger than their roles here. So, watching it now, would it just be crackalicious fun with one of the Coreys and crazy Gary Busey, but not worth watching for the movie itself?

The answer? Yes, it is crackalicious fun with Corey and Gary. And I still love it. There’s a lot that just works in this movie, and it thankfully outweighs the stuff that doesn’t.

(Everything until the end involves minor spoilers.)

The characters are hands-down the best part of this movie. Wheelchair-bound Marty is at the center of the action, and his disability plays an enormous part in the both the suspense and illuminating the other characters, yet the movie avoids making him precious, avoids making statements, or falling into any cloying sentiments that could have easily bogged down both the plot and characters.

Gary Busey just might have been made to play Uncle Red. He’s a twice-divorced alcoholic who dotes on Marty and whose sister (Marty’s mother, in a small but well-played role by Robin Groves) disapproves of his lifestyle. He’s the uncle who comes over to his sister’s house, gets drunk and plays poker with Marty, tells the naughty jokes, shouts obscenities, and builds Marty’s motorized wheelchair-bike (the Silver Bullet).

Early on, there’s this great conversation between Red and Marty’s mother, Nan, after Red has come over for one of those drinking nights. She asks him not to drink in front of Marty, Red yells at her not to boss him around (ah, those big sisters.)

NAN: Red, I don’t care how you live. But he is a very impressionable little boy.
RED: You know, you think your only responsibility is getting his butt out of the chair and into the tub and out of the chair and onto the toilet. And you oughta realize there’s more to Marty than him not being able to walk.
NAN: It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?
RED: Yeah, it is!
NAN: You blow in here once a month, and you tell a few jokes, and you have a few beers, and you want to lecture me about how to raise my son. Well, I am the one responsible for how he feels when he sees you like this, and how he feels when you leave! Red, Marty has enough strikes against him as it is—
RED: (interrupting) He doesn’t have any strikes against him!
NAN: —that I am scared to death that some day he is just going to give up.
RED: He’s not going to give up!
NAN: Well he doesn’t need you showing him how to do it!

And this is the kind of dynamic that I really love in this movie. Yes, the mother is over-protective, and yes, Red is a bad role model. But both of them are understandable and believable, and yes, both of them are right. What I also find impressive is that, despite this blowup and the echoes of it in their later conversations, Red and Nan still get along later. There’s no making either one of them into the bad guy or the good guy. And Red, whose view of Marty seems to sit somewhere in the realm between Denial and Eternal Optimism, is the one who eventually puts Marty in a position where he’s in the most danger – yet even that action isn’t ever given a ‘bad’ label (because the ‘bad’ is obviously the werewolf, no matter how recklessly-indulgent-cuz-he-loves-Marty Red can be.)

Then there’s Jane, who is perfect (and more importantly, also believable) as the sensible older sister who is resentful of the burden Marty’s disability places on her and of how much slack their mother gives Marty, but who isn’t Teh Eveeel. She forgives him when he’s a twerp without martyring herself, and apologizes when she’s been overly impatient with him. She also plays the necessary straight man against Marty and Uncle Red. Her mixture of practicality and acceptance becomes essential to the plot – as close as Uncle Red and Marty are, it is Jane who is able to convince the skeptical Uncle Red that a) Marty is in danger, and b) the killer might be more than just a psycho human.

Silver Bullet isn’t a character-driven movie, though – it’s werewolf-driven. Between the scenes where we get to know Marty and family, we get to see the werewolf killing people: the drunk railroad maintenance man who he beheads with a swipe of his paw (when I was nine, that flying head was the most awesome shot ever), the pregnant single woman who is about to kill herself.

The first two murders only touch Marty peripherally, but the third victim is his almost-girlfriend’s drunk slob of a father, and the fourth victim is Marty’s best friend (and kind of a jerk) Brady.

Are you sensing a theme about the victims here?

The small town is essentially another character in this movie, and is described at the beginning (before the terror) as “A town where people cared about each other as much as they cared about themselves.” Which is, I think, a fantastic description – it first gives the impression that everything is on-the-surface perfect, but really … how many people care about themselves and take care of themselves as well as they should?

The townspeople aren’t as nicely drawn as the Coslaw family – they definitely run more to stereotypes: The hunter at the bar with the loud mouth, the gentle giant bartender who carries a baseball bat called ‘The Peacemaker,’ the in-over-his-head but competent sheriff, and the minister who tries to comfort everyone when everything starts going apeshit and the bodies start piling up.

And this is another point where I love this movie. Horror so often takes an apparently-perfect situation and peels back the layers to reveal the rot hidden underneath: the drunks, the molestations, the secret pregnancies. Silver Bullet doesn’t do that. Those things aren’t hidden in this town; everyone knows that the first victim was a drunk, and Jane sees the pregnant woman being rejected by the father of the baby. At one of the early gatherings of the townspeople in their favorite bar, we learn that everyone knows who is behind on their taxes. This isn’t a town of secrets; it’s a town where people are just people, for good or bad, and everyone recognizes that.

So when even the ‘bad’ people in the town are shown to be normal, it highlights the werewolf’s wrongness even more. A town that has a few drunks? That’s normal. Ripping them apart? It’s unnatural.

This is another point where the movie really works: It doesn’t try to explain the werewolf. There’s no mystic force behind it, no ancient curse, we don’t know how [spoiler] became a werewolf, and it’s even suggested that he doesn’t even know how he became one.

One thing that often kills horror movies is digging too deep into the reasons WHY? and then coming up with a crappy explanation. How many times have you sat in a movie (or read a book) that, although it was going along great, suddenly became really, really stupid as soon as you found out why it was all happening?

Silver Bullet avoids that by … well, avoiding it. I imagine that some viewers will be disappointed that there’s not more explanation behind the werewolf, but it really worked for me.

Was the werewolf scary, though? … hmm, maybe not so much. Although some of the suspenseful parts where the werewolf is stalking someone out of sight were well done, Silver Bullet suffers from the same problems that many similar movies do: Once you show the monster, he’s not quite as scary. (This is also the scene that I’m talking about when I say that Uncle Red, though acting out of love, doesn’t exactly help Marty and is reckless – he gives Marty some fireworks to go shoot at night, even though there’s a mass murderer on the loose that has already killed his best friend. In romance, we call that TSTL, and I’m not sure who is dumber here: Marty or his uncle.)

There is a transformation scene, too – though not bad by 1985 standards, it’s also not An American Werewolf in London or The Howling.

Then there are a couple of missteps, and the biggest one comes right in the middle of the movie. A little humor is all well and good in horror (and I think necessary), but there is a scene after Brady has been killed when the townspeople form a mob to go after the killer. There’s some great tension between the people, the sheriff, and the boy’s father. There’s a lovely setting in the woods where the fog is thick and creeping over the ground, and visibility is low, and the townspeople realize they are being hunted beneath the fog.

And it all becomes a joke. I’ll admit I laughed out loud when the werewolf started beating the people with The Peacemaker (the bartender’s bat) because it was campy and funny … but it also throws off the tone of the movie, and it doesn’t make sense. The whole point of the werewolf is that he’s ripping people apart, he’s unnatural, he’s terrifying … he shouldn’t be funny. And yet that scene skews him in that direction. And even though it’s only for a short time, it makes everything feel off, and something that should have been horrifying (Brady’s death, and the townspeople’s mob-like reaction) is played for a laugh.

But despite that misstep, and a few other “Oh, come on!” moments, this is a fun, solid little film, perfect for Halloween (or any other time when you have friends over, and shouting OMG, IT’S ONE OF THE COREYS! seems like it might be just as entertaining as the movie itself).

Or, you know, just play this fan-made tribute to Corey Haim.

Thank you Meljean for the fabulous post! And holy crap, that Corey Haim tribute video is something else.

Yesterday, the wonderful Harry Markov of Temple Library Reviews – or Harrymonster, as we like to call him – had us Book Smugglers over at his blog for a Halloween interview. Today, we return the favor! See, Harry, Ana and myself make up our own Unholy Trinity – Harry as Harrymonster/chainsaw-wielding maniac, Ana as the master Ninja Assassin, and I as ZombieThea (note the battle cry for BRAAAINS). In the spirit of our Trinity, of course we had to have Harry over for a chat.

Without further ado, we give you our chat with Harry!

The Book Smugglers: Do you celebrate Halloween?

Harry: I don’t have Halloween traditions, although mentally and spiritually I am all tuned for the holiday and if you visit my home town you will most likely find me begging evil creatures that hide in the dark to devour people I generally don’t like. There have been attempts to participate in a masked party or just roam the streets and shuffle around. So far I have missed the last three years on such plans, but hopefully this year.

The Book Smugglers: What (if any) are the Halloween celebrations in Bulgaria? Can you describe your traditions (even if they are completely your own and have nothing to do with Bulgarian celebrations)?

Harry: Since we are orthodox in Bulgaria, there is pretty much no such thing as Halloween. We are fans of the martyrs and saints and usually have special dedicated for these figures. But there is one tradition that comes closest to Halloween. The men dress up as monsters and dance in the streets with bells to scare the evil winter spirits and bring health and fertility with the new year. It’s a very loud exorcism and dates back to the Middle Ages, if I am correct in my estimation.

The Book Smugglers: What was your most outrageous Halloween costume? (Or, what would be the most awesome/outrageous costume you wish you could wear, but never have?)

Harry: I haven’t had an official costume yet for Halloween, but during my German classes we had quite a few stage games and I have worn a lot of costumes, but none were outrageous. I want to paint my body in chalk white, add blue-grey and wear white hair and eyes. The costume will be plastic sheets wrapped around me in a robe fashion as if I am a corpse in one of those morgue sacks, but see through.

The Book Smugglers: If you could be any Halloween monster (zombie, vampire, werewolf, ghost, etc), what would you be?

Harry: Oh that is pretty easy. I want to be a wraith, but not just a simple wraith, but quite pissed and vengeful apparition. That way I can be incorporeal, which means floating and flying and at the same time affect the physical world, when I kill people most mercilessly. Yup, I am going to be a bastard in my death.

The Book Smugglers: What’s your favorite book and/or movie to get into the Halloween spirit?

Harry: I don’t have a favorite book, because I never ever re-read… The ending is always the same sadly. However zombie movies and anything bizarre. Yesterday I watched “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and although a rock musical comedy it screamed Halloween mental patient to me and I have been aching to find the soundtrack to that movie.

The Book Smugglers: Do you know any good Halloween myths or scary stories? Care to share one with us?

Harry: YES! Do I? Man, I grew up summoning spirits with a mirror, lipstick, cookies and a penny. Hah. There are the ever popular Queens, one queen for ever color of cards. The Queen of Diamonds sliced your veins while showering, while the Queen of Hearts ripped your chest open and ate your heart. The most popular was the Queen of Spades, who is pretty much like your Bloody Marry. Also dead people like pennies. Leave one on a grave at midnight and you will see a ghastly hand trying to grab it. I recall something about calling three old dead ladies again at the cemetery at midnight, but it’s all vague now.

The Book Smugglers: And since this question is so. damn. awesome. can we steal it and ask it back to you: In which horror movie would you like to be a protagonist and what kind of protagonist would you like to be. Give me details and there is no limit to answers. You can be a chimp with a lightsaber in Night of the Living Dead for all we care.

Harry: That is pretty damn easy. I wanna be an all powerful wizard in an apocalypse of super fast and mutated zombies. Tarantino will be movie director along with Clive Barker and Stephen King as the script writer. Imagine how grand it’s going to be… *sigh* Anyway I will have nuclear ranking powers that will kill mercilessly and fly. I am also considering whether to wear magic cape or spandex and who to have as partner, but Thea sounds right for the job.

So there you have it, folks! Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some lightsaber wielding chimps to train. Thanks again, Harry for the fabulous interview!

For Halloween Week 2009, we will be bringing you a different guest blogger each day, sharing their own Halloween Words of Wisdom and Ponderings. Today, we give you the uber-talented and supercool Graeme, of Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review. A fellow book blogger and horror fan, Graeme tells us what happens…When Books Attack!

Give it up, boys and ghouls, for Graeme!

‘When Books Attack…’

Books are great aren’t they? I know I’m preaching to the converted here (well, is there anyone reading this blog who isn’t completely mad about books?) but it’s still a fact that there’s nothing better you can do with a spare five minutes than pick up a book and have a read. Books take you out of this world and into another one entirely. Books introduce you to some of the most interesting people you will ever meet and not only do you get to meet them but you also get to hang out with them and see them do the most amazing stuff. If I wasn’t writing this post then the odds are I would be reading something right now.

Books are also strange things though. Not only do they have the power to transport you into another world but sometimes a well written tale can burst right through the page and invade our own. It doesn’t happen all that often but when it does…

Let me tell you the tale of when this happened to me. If you want to hum the ‘Twilight Zone’ theme then now would probably be the best time to start…

It was a couple of years ago and the wife and I were camping in the middle of Dartmoor. Strangely enough, the weather was gorgeous (if you’ve been to Dartmoor, you’ll know what I mean) but that wasn’t the freakiest thing to happen. Things were about to get a lot freakier and it was all down to the book I was reading…

I’d found myself a copy of Robert McCammon’s short story collection ‘Blue World’ and was completely lost in this very under rated horror writer’s work. Seriously, when he’s on form McCammon is brilliant; check out ‘Blue World’ and ‘They Thirst’ (better than ‘Dracula’ in my opinion) if you get a chance. This is a guy who can get right under your skin and make your hair stand on end. The story that got to me the most was ‘Yellowjacket Summer’ where a family trip comes to an unexpected halt in a deserted town. I say ‘deserted’ but what I really mean is ‘deserted apart from a couple of people and a strange boy who can control all the hornets in the area’. I’m scared of wasps and bees so it completely freaked me out reading about the boy who goes to the toilet (in the café) and gets absolutely covered by a swarm of hornets. They don’t sting him but you know they could… The aforementioned strange boy wants the new arrivals to stay in town and he’s not afraid to use a swarm of hornets to get what he wants. The family is after a quick exit though and everything blows up in a massive stinging frenzy. The last thing the reader sees is the family heading out of town in a van that’s low on fuel and being followed by the biggest swarm of hornets that you’ve ever seen…

I couldn’t get ‘Yellowjacket Summer’ out of my head and I was still thinking about it when I went to for a shower the next morning. The toilet cubicles were open at the top (it was in a barn) so imagine how I felt when I heard a really loud buzzing and a hornet came to hover right over me… I couldn’t move (seriously, these things scare me to death!) and was stuck there for ages, waiting to see if the hornet decided to have a piece of me. Luckily it didn’t…

Now, life is full of little coincidences but to read a scary story about hornets and then get to see one at close quarters the very next day…? There was definitely more to this than met the eye. I was just glad that I hadn’t had a visitation along the lines of what happened in McCammon’s ‘He’ll Come Knocking at Your Door’! Read it and you’ll see what I mean…

There’s more to this world than we know and even the most innocent looking book can some back and bite you when you least expect it (if it hasn’t already, has something similar happened to you?) I hope that you enjoy whatever you’re reading this Halloween; just keep an eye out after you put the book down…

A couple of months ago read, or at least, try to read, Night’s Rose by Annaliese Evans and it ended up being the first ever book that neither of us were able to finish. The result was a conversational style review in which we examined the reasons why we did not finish the book. The review sparked a pretty good discussion on reader’s expectation based on blurb and cover and about publishers’ marketing strategies. You can read all about it here.

We also had a giveaway with that review and we offered the winner, Danielle (who was chosen randomly), the option to write up a review of the book, agreeing or disagreeing with us – and she accepted it. Here is what she has to say.

Title: Night’s Rose

Author: Annaliese Evans

Genre: Fantasy/ Paranormal Romance

Publisher: Tor
Publishing Date: March 31, 2009
Paperback: 384 pages

Stand Alone or series: first in a series

Summary: Beauty was not awakened by a kiss.

With the help of her handsome allies, Rose may yet find it

Danielle’s Review: ***BEWARE SPOILERS!!!***

(more…)

Since July 19th, we have been celebrating all things Young Adult with guest posts, authors interviews, reviews and giveaways.

Now it is time to open the floor to you, dear reader so that you can be part of the party as well!

Throughout the day today, this post will be open to anyone with a blog to join in the fun. All you have to do is add your blog name (and the title of your post between brackets or at least an indication of what it is about!) and the url of your post in the form below and voila, all the posts will be listed here for everybody to read. Your post can be a review of a favorite oldie, a review of a new (or new to you) YA novel, a post reflecting on the genre, or even a piece on why you DON’T read YA. Anything at all, as long as it is about YA.

Let’s get this party started!

For our Young Adult Appreciation Month, we invited a few bloggers to guest post about Young Adult books. This week’s guest is Kristi, from The Story Siren blog, whom we chatted with about her YA reading. The Story Siren is a great YA blog with reviews interviews and the great “Books to Pine for” feature that has put many a book in our radars.

Without further ado, here is our Chat with The Story Siren
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The Book Smugglers: Kristi, glad to have you here. Can you tell us why do you read and blog about YA books?

Kristi: I read because I love to do it. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing. It’s actually one of the only constants in my life. Which is a pretty remarkable thing. I’m not sure why I started reading YA. It isn’t something that I consciously chose to do. I didn’t walk into the library and head over to the YA section. Honestly I didn’t even know what a YA section was, let alone if they had one or not. Growing up there was never a prominent “YA” section. At least I never remember there being one. By the time middle school rolled around I was already reading adult novels, I wanted more to my stories than a sparkly world with an even more sparkly ending. My YA obsession started with Twilight. Yes, I’m one of those people, but I was one of those people that read it when it first came out. I’d always been a vampire fan, I read The Vampire Diaries the first time it was released, was an fan of the original Buffy, Anne Rice, The Lost Boys, etc… but there was something different. I felt a connection with the story, the characters, something caught my attention. So I tried something different, I picked up Dessen, Cabot, Anderson, Paolini, and discovered this world of awesomely written literature that I was missing.

Blogging on the other hand is a whole different story. I just wanted a way to keep track of all the books I read. To remember what it was exactly I thought about that book. My blog was never meant to be what it is today. But once I discovered that I wasn’t the only crazy person in the world, it was outstandingly liberating! The YA blogging community is so awesome. It’s a very supportive and helpful group, and I’m so honored to be a part of it.

The Book Smugglers: Why do you think YA books sell so well (as YA novels kick the pants off of genre fiction Speculative Fiction, in sales terms).

Kristi: Because it has universal appeal. Sure, it’s “aimed” at teens, but there are a ton of adults who enjoy reading YA and I’m one of them. There is something there that we all feel a connection with. On top of that, there are some fabulously talented authors in the world of YA literature. I admire their enthusiasm and passion.

The Book Smugglers: Where does the YA genre go from here – are these books the future of publishing? Does the boom continue, or is it a blip?

Kristi: YA is definitely the future of publishing. Worldwide YA novels are continuing to increase in book sales. Sure, it probably has a lot to do with the Harry Potter and Twilight phenomenon, but these two franchises are getting people to read. And those people are most likely going to continue to read. And like I said above, it has universal appeal. YA isn’t only for young adults!

The Book Smugglers: Do you think there are subjects that are inappropriate for the YA audience?

Kristi: No. Anyone that thinks teens are in this protective bubble that filters everything “bad” in the world is ignorant. Teens talk about and have sex. Teens talk about and do drugs and drink alcohol. Believe it or not teens even cuss! I’m not saying that those things should be glamorized, but to exclude them all together is unrealistic. And blaming and banning books because they include these things is ludicrous! I guarantee that there are teens that don’t read books that are still having sex and doing drugs… so what/who are they influenced by?

It’s a parents job to talk to and teach their teen about what is appropriate. It’s a parents job to sensor what they think their teen should be reading.

The Book Smugglers: What are your favorite YA books?

Kristi: I read so many books, it’s hard to have favorites. But I do have some that stick out in my mind:

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
Lament by Maggie Stiefvater
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
and I just recently read Ballads of Suburbia by Stephanie Kuehnert and it was wow.

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Thank you Kristi, for taking the time to chat with us!

Wanna join the discussion? What do YOU think: are there subjects that are inappropriate for the YA audience?