Welcome to our third guest post in the YAAM – 2010 edition. As part of our celebration of all things YA, we invited authors from different genres to write articles about the books and the genres they write.

Today’s guest is Sarah Rees Brennan, one of Ana’s favourite writers, author of The Demon’s Lexicon and The Demon’s Covenant. We invited Sarah to talk about YA and to answer that infamous question: why should we read YA?

Here is what she has to say:

But Tell Me – When Are You Going To Write a REAL Book?

We’ve all heard someone say it.

I like agent Jennifer Laughran’s succinct reply on the subject: ‘YA writing is fine, but eventually you should “graduate” to writing grown-up books. Errr… screw you.’ But since I think Ana and Thea would scrag me if ’screw you’ was the entirety of my guest blog, here are some more thoughts on Why YA.

Here’s a thing about YA, and I freely admit this is not a revelation I had myself, but rather something that I think fabulous YA writer Holly Black said first (and then I stole it, and then Scott Westerfeld stole it. Or possibly I do fabulous YA writer Mr Westerfeld a wrong, and he said it first, and then I stole it, and then Holly Black stole it. We YA writers are a scurvy bunch. All I’m sure of is that, I AM A THIEF OF WORDS.)

YA is about your first time. And not just that first time, though that’s often on the table as well.

It’s about the first time you ever get betrayed by a friend. The first time you fell in love. The first time you realised, on a bone-deep, gut-deep level, that the world was unfair, that something terrible and irreversible could happen to you, that nobody was coming to save you. And the first time is a really intense time – it’s shocking, it cuts deep. The world never comes as such a surprise again.

I’m not saying YA always gets this feeling down, but when it does, YA is like a knife that cuts both ways. (A… knife with no handle. …I’ve never really understood that song.)

An excellent example of what I mean about the questions raised by YA would be The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson, which is a funny, heartbreaking book – the best books, as we all know, are both funny and heartbreaking – which is about what happens when you start to feel disconnected from your first tightly knit group of friends, what happens when you find out you or someone you’re close to aren’t society’s idea of the norm before you realise how ridiculous those norms really are, what happens when you love someone, they betray you, and you keep loving them anyway.

Another thing about YA is that it’s a time when almost everyone is sometimes a jerk.

Think about it. Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye is a jerk. (And if Catcher in the Rye was published today it would be YA, and people who now love it would sneer at it. Yes it would! Yes they would! Which goes to show how silly judging quality by category really is.) Holden actually is enough of a jerk that he gets up my nose anyway, but it would be so much worse if he was an adult, and I’ve read enough books with grown-up Holdens in it that I am certain of this.

One movie that never fails to get on my nerves is As Good As It Gets. In which Jack Nicholson plays an assbucket.

RECEPTIONIST: How do you write women so well?
JACK NICHOLSON’S CHARACTER: I think of a man, and then I take away reason and accountability.
SARAH: Assbucket! He sounds like the worst writer in the world!

Now, of course Jack Nicholson’s character has OCD, which has given him a jaundiced view on life (not that everyone with OCD does, but it’s a reason if not an excuse for his behaviour) and Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear’s characters help redeem him and make him ease up on the misogyny and homophobia, and I am not saying that people can’t change/redeem themselves at any age.

But really. He is such an awful character. And he has been going around making the world unpleasant for people for at least fifty years. In fifty years, has he never noticed that he is terrible? At this point, I don’t care. I just wave my arms at the screen and yell ‘Assbucket!’

Whereas it’s okay for a teenager to have not realised yet what a huge jerk they’re being, how this affects the people around them, or what behaviour means they’re a jerk. Teens have a lot going on, and not that much time for it to go on in! Sorry Carlisle in Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover is an assbucket, and I love him. Ditto Felicity Worthington in Libba Bray’s A Great And Terrible Beauty.

The hero of the Demon’s Lexicon series, my own Nick? Yeah, I have to admit: total assbucket.

A genre in which you can explore the most flawed characters, with the most room for growth and change? How could anyone not want to write in that genre?

And at a time when everything seems like life or death, what if the situation really was life or death? That’s what draws me to YA fantasy the very most: because you can take that experience, and raise the stakes.

It is no secret to those who know me, or indeed to the world wide web, that I truly and deeply in my soul love cheesy teen movies. It is like my love for country music. I cannot explain it. I just feel it. I have seen all three High School Musical movies, I have seen Wild Child, I have seen 17 Again, I have seen this movie called The Derby Stallion starring Zac Efron, a movie that I cannot talk about without having deeply traumatic flashbacks.

And so of course, in the fullness of time, I came to see a made-for-TV Disney movie called The Wizards of Waverly Place. And actually, I really liked it. What is this movie even about, you say? I will tell you!

It’s about a family of wizards, who will all have magical powers until they reach the age of wizard majority or something, at which point they have a crazy tournament and only the winner gets to keep their magical powers. The family in question’s father deliberately lost his power so he could marry their nonwizard mother, and their aunt (who also lost her powers) is estranged from both her brothers. Anyway so the heroine of this movie is Alex, the middle child and the only girl, and she is by way of being kind of a thoughtless but charming rogue! Which I always like to see girls being, as they get to be unapologetic rogues less often than boys. And the hero of the movie is her older brother Justin, who is straight-laced, dedicated to his studies and also dedicated to scooping his little sister out of trouble. And the plot of the movie is that they have to go on an Epic Quest, which of course teaches them to appreciate each others’ abilities, rely on each other, save each other multiple times and of course heartbreakingly confess their love for each other. (See the picture. Hug it out, Alex and Justin. Hug it out.)

This movie intrigues me for two reasons. One is the fabulous premise, which as soon as I work out how to make my own I will be stealing from Disney and making it so that there is a lot of Gothic goings-on, including actually being tempted to kill your sibling. (Which you really might be! If they were competition for the most important thing to you in the world! And how could you have a normal family relationship if you were aware of that growing up anyway?) But in the end, of course, love would triumph. Because I am a big sap.

The other is that YA affords you more opportunities to tell stories like that. About the love between friends, which is the main subject of the aforementioned Bermudez Triangle.

And about the love between siblings. Having siblings as a teenager is a fascinating and frustrating thing. It’s a time when you’re fighting to be recognised as an individual in your own right, and trying to figure out exactly who that individual is, and thus a time in which you might realise that you are extremely different from the people with whom you’ll still be sharing a roof for a good few years. Passions run high! There’s sibling jealousy, sibling competition, siblings banding together against parents, and fierce sibling affection.

The first book of my Demon’s Lexicon series was very consciously constructed as a sibling romance. (No. Wait. Come back. I didn’t mean in a Flowers in the Attic way!) But many a romance goes like this: protagonist wonders about other character’s feelings for them. Protagonist is given serious reason to doubt other character’s feelings for them. Matters Build to a Climax, with things looking ever more dire for Our Protagonist, and then we and Protagonist discover other character’s secret: Other Character, as it turns out, loves Protagonist very much. It was fun to be able to use that structure to tell a story that wasn’t a romance, to say that there are more stories in heaven and earth than people dream of. Which is not to say that I don’t love a good romance. I do love a good romance, and there’s romance in my books. But the emotional heart of the books is familial love: between brothers Nick and Alan, brother and sister pair Mae and Jamie, Sin and her much younger brother and sister, and the complicated relationships all have with their separate parents. And I love that I can do that, in YA, and it’ll mean so much: I love that it was easier to do that in YA than it would’ve been for any other genre.

This woman is mad, you may say at this point. Mad and lacking in taste! She freely admits to enjoying a Disney movie more than a movie which won MANY OSCARS, including Jack Nicholson’s for Best Assbucket! No wonder she likes writing YA.

And therein lies the most important reason to the eternal question of Why YA: I really do like doing it. I love doing it, and I’m proud of it. To me, YA has some of the realest books there are. And that’s why YA.

About the author: Sarah Rees Brennan was born and raised in Ireland by the sea, where her teachers valiantly tried to make her fluent in Irish (she wants you to know it’s not called Gaelic) but she chose to read books under her desk in class instead. The books most often found under her desk were Jane Austen, Margaret Mahy, Anthony Trollope, Robin McKinley and Diana Wynne Jones, and she still loves them all today.

After college she lived briefly in New York and somehow survived in spite of her habit of hitching lifts in fire engines. She began working on The Demon’s Lexicon while doing a Creative Writing MA and library work in Surrey, England. Since then she has returned to Ireland to write and use as a home base for future adventures. Her Irish is still woeful, but she feels the books under the desk were worth it.

Thank you Sarah!

And we turn the question back to you, dear reader: why do YOU read YA?

Welcome to our second guest post (the first one, by Michael Grant on writing dystopian fiction is here) in the YAAM – 2010 edition. As part of our celebration of all things YA, we invited authors from different genres to write articles about the books and the genres they write.

We are proud to present today’s guest: Zetta Elliott – writer, educator, activist and author of the excellent YA novel A Wish After Midnight.

Please, give it up for Zetta!

Everything we experience in life prepares us for what’s next. At least, that’s what I like to believe. I grew up not being the favorite in my family, which means I got used to my big brother getting the largest slice of pie and I struggled mightily to escape my older sister’s imposing shadow. Birth order may have something to do with the person I’ve become, but I like to believe that, ultimately, my childhood prepared me to recognize and reject “the myth of meritocracy.” I learned early on that I would always have to work harder to be seen and heard; no matter my talents or achievements, to some I would always be invisible.

What better preparation for life as a black feminist writer?

When I was invited to write this guest post on diversity in YA lit, I immediately agreed because of the respect I have for Ana and Thea. Their comprehensive analysis and ongoing coverage of the endless whitewashing scandals impressed me, and I hoped I could write something original and important about racism in the industry. But the truth is, I’m not sure how much more I have to say about the lack of equity in children’s publishing. I’ve tackled the subject in my open letter, on my Huffington Post blog, and in guest posts on other allies’ blogs. I’ve addressed the issue on conference panels and during radio interviews, and earlier this month I was even on C-Span! I do worry about sounding like a broken record, and know that my increased visibility as a so-called “expert” on the subject has made me unpopular in certain circles. Popularity was never my goal, however, so I count that as no great loss. But I was troubled when I saw this comment on a blogger’s review of AWAM: “I didn’t know Zetta had written a book! I was very impressed with her at the Book Blogger Convention, so I’m very glad to see this review. Thanks for letting us know about it!”

Now, I *do* wear a number of different hats, but first and foremost I think of myself as a writer. And as a writer, it is my job to make sure that people know about my books! So clearly, in the midst of my campaign for greater diversity, I must have dropped the ball. When I sat down to compile a list of the publishing privileges enjoyed by most white authors, it never occurred to me to add, “You will probably not lose your focus (or identity) as an artist by advocating for equity in the publishing industry.” Nor will you be “blacklisted” by agents and editors for trying to expose the myth of meritocracy. Nor will you experience “the weathering effect,” stressors that can compromise the health of people of color who are forced to live in a racist society.

Can I blame my weekly migraines on racism in the publishing industry? Maybe not. And I can’t definitively say that I’m being punished for openly critiquing the very white world of children’s literature. I can say that I’ve been unable to find an agent, even when friends and would-be allies share with me the names of their reps. I can say that despite having one award-winning book, I’ve been unable to sell any of the 20 picture book manuscripts taking up space on my hard drive. Major review outlets took a pass on my YA novel, which I initially self-published after five years of rejection by small and large presses alike.

Some might argue that this is a problem of my own making—after all, lots of aspiring authors face years of rejection. Perhaps it isn’t institutional racism but my “bad attitude” and lack of talent that’s to blame. If I were twelve again, that logic might actually make sense to me.

Because when I was twelve, I didn’t know that privilege is arbitrarily assigned and generally unearned. I thought there must be something I could do to win others’ approval. Now, as I near forty (with a PhD and substantial publication record under my belt), I know that I can only be who I am—and who I am is good enough. Statistics published by the CCBC prove that black authors are marginalized within the industry; we write less than 2% of the 5000 books published for children in the US annually, yet African Americans make up 12% of the population. Do all but a handful of us have bad attitudes? Are the vast majority of us incapable of writing publishable stories? Or is the industry simply satisfied with maintaining the status quo it has worked so hard to create?

“Oh, no!” I hear some of you protest. “The industry’s made up of well-meaning liberal types who wouldn’t dream of deliberately excluding truly talented writers.” And from another corner I hear an earnest editor insisting that she’d love to publish more writers of color, “but their manuscripts simply don’t cross my desk!” Yet how many of those well-meaning editors attended our panel on diversity in YA at the recent Harlem Book Fair? A literary event in an historically black neighborhood might be a good place to meet aspiring black authors… And how many “liberal types” from the publishing industry will attend the upcoming black children’s literature conference at NYU (A is for Anansi)? How many are willing to get behind a US Publishing Equalities Charter?

I would like to devote all of my time to my writing. I would love to escape to a room of my own and there remain oblivious to the inequality that keeps so many of us locked outside of the industry. But my hero, James Baldwin, insists such a fate isn’t for me. “The point is to get your work done,” he once wrote, “and your work is to change the world.” So that’s what I’m going to try to do—with the help of my friends, my peers, and any prospective allies who are willing to get on board. For someone like me, there’s a price to be paid for criticizing the industry; I knew that when I first spoke out over a year ago, and I’ve (almost) accepted the likelihood that those 20 unpublished manuscripts will stay right where they are on my laptop’s hard drive. Before writing this guest post I spent the better part of the day finalizing a book of poetry for children that I plan to self-publish. I won’t win any awards by going that route, and I certainly won’t become rich and famous. But I know now that I don’t have to wait for the stamp of approval that the industry so stubbornly withholds. Reality TV has shown us just how much talent there is in the world. Very few artists are lucky enough to get past the official gatekeepers, but we still exist. And we know that we’re good enough to compete—all we’re asking for is a chance.

(Many thanks to my good friend, Shadra Strickland, for posting this video on Facebook. Comedian Dave Chappelle invokes “the elephant in the room,” which is also the title of a recent online article on diversity in publishing by Elizabeth Bluemle.)

About the author: I’m a black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children. I was born and raised in Canada, but have lived in the US for over a dozen years. I currently live in my beloved Brooklyn. When I’m not writing, you’re most likely to find me strolling through the botanic garden…

A huge thank you to Zetta!

Next Saturday in our YAAM series of Guest Posts: Sarah Rees Brennan on Why Read YA.

Welcome to our first guest post in the YAAM – 2010 edition. As part of our celebration of all things YA, we tried to invite authors from different genres to write articles about the books and the genres they write. Michael Grant is the author of the Gone books (so far with three books published: Gone, Hunger and Lies), one of Thea’s favourite Dystopian series. Please give it up for Michael Grant!

The GONE series. Oh, good lord, why did I write the GONE series? Approximately 550 pages each. Times 6. Which — if you can believe the calculator app on my laptop — totals 3,300 pages.

Would this be a good point to mention that I don’t touch-type? Two fingers. Left and right index. Occasionally, if it’s something exciting like an action scene, I can use the middle finger on my right hand. Middle finger on my left hand? Totally useless. I swear that finger contributes nothing and I hate it.

Where was I?

The GONE series (GONE, HUNGER, LIES so far and PLAGUE, DARKNESS and LIGHT still to come,) has a simple premise: one day for reasons no one understands at first, everyone 15 and over disappears from the town of Perdido Beach, California. The kids left behind soon discover three salient facts: they are trapped inside an impenetrable dome, some of them are mutating in fairly disturbing ways, and your 15th birthday doesn’t necessarily call for a party.

So, one day I was thinking about 1) LOST, 2) THE STAND and 3) This half-formed idea I have called GUNS AND DRAGONS. (How great is that name? Guns are cool, Dragons are cool. Put them together and it’s a case of coolness squared.)

And one last thing: I was thinking about Disney movies. What do Disney movies always do? Aside from recycling dance sequences? And going with the cute animal sidekick? They kill Mom. Little Mermaid? Dead mom. Bambi? Dead mom. Aladdin? Dead mom. Nemo? Mom was a Filet-O-Fish sandwich some kid ate half of and then threw out.

A slight digression: Everyone said when THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG came out that the cool thing was to have an African-American heroine. That was cool. And about damn time. But the amazing thing, the knock-me-down Disney revolution was: mom was not dead! An actual mother. In a Disney movie!

So, anyway, LOST, THE STAND, GUNS AND DRAGONS and every matricidal Disney movie ever made. That’s what I was thinking about. And suddenly, I had it. A group of characters cut off from the outside world, in an existential struggle between good and evil, with the laws of nature rewritten, and not just dead moms, not even both parents dead, but everyone over the age of 15 wiped out!

Wiped out! Gone! By Michael Grant.

With GONE I started with an over-the-top fantasy/science fiction/horror premise, and then wrote it with absolute seriousness and all the realism I could bring to it. The basic idea may be crazy, but the way it plays out is realistic. My characters aren’t all good or all bad. (Well, except for Drake who is definitely all bad.) My characters make mistakes, do stupid things, do mean or short-sighted things. Some go well beyond short-sighted all the way to evil. But I work at making sure all the characters stay real — even when that frustrates readers.

The result with GONE is a very dangerous, violent, intense world. Because although good often triumphs over evil, it takes its sweet time doing it. There is love and romance in GONE but it’s not the main focus. Characters in GONE are mostly paying attention to finding food, avoiding being eaten by killer worms, avoiding being purged by sick-minded bigots and dealing with the fact that Drake is walking around with a ten foot tentacle where his arm used to be. When they have the time they have romance. But their first priority is survival.

So, it’s a mix of the hot and the horrifying. Kind of like the Megan Fox – Brian Austin Greene marriage.

I have a simple goal as a writer. I don’t care much whether I get good reviews. (Although I do get them.) And I don’t care whether I hit bestseller lists. (Although, it’s kind of cool when I do.) I really set out every day to write a story that makes readers stay up all night reading.

The thing that is special about science fiction, fantasy and horror — and GONE fits somewhere on that spectrum — is that in addition to keeping readers up all night neglecting their homework, I get to think about some interesting ideas. In GONE we deal with politics: who’s in charge, who should be in charge? And there’s just a bit of philosophy: what is true and how do we know it? And moral issues: are right and wrong always the same or do they change when circumstances change?

There are even sneaky bits of history. A rather obscure case is that of Zil and Human Crew. Zil is modeled on the rise of Hitler. Zil’s main supporters are Turk, Hank, Lance and Antoine. Without going into too much boring detail, I’ll say that each is based on a member of Hitler’ inner circle. (One easy clue: Lance means spear, and spear in German is speer. As in Albert Speer, the handsome, well-educated architect who gave Hitler some glamor.) In LIES Zil and Human Crew even stage a sort of burning of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, which was burned by the Nazis who then tried to use the ensuing chaos to take power.

Of course I don’t really expect anyone to see all that while reading the book, but in the course of doing my main job — frightening readers and keeping them up all night — a science fiction sort of premise gives me an opportunity to write about some interesting issues, and I hope make readers think a little about good and evil, and the ease with which good people can cross the line.

It adds a level of interest for me as well as for readers. And that makes it fun to use those two (and occasionally three) fingers to type those 550 page manuscripts.

A quick note on where the series stands. I have completed book #4, PLAGUE. (Which sounds like a happy book, doesn’t it?) And I have just crossed the 200 page mark on DARKNESS.

And still my left middle finger contributes nothing to the writing process. Although it occasionally helps me when I’m driving in traffic.

Thank you Michael!

Our last day of our Steampunk Appreciation Weeks is dedicated to Steampunk Romance. First up is an article by Heather Massey, the force behind The Galaxy Express, a dedicated niche blog for all things Science Fiction Romance; her blog champions the genre providing great insights about it as well as giving in-depth reviews of SFR books and profiles/interviews of SFR authors.

And she is here today to talk about Steampunk Romance. Please give it up for Heather!

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Steampunk Romance: Love, Gadgets, & Themes

What is steampunk romance? Easy. It’s a tale that combines steampunk and romance. (What, you thought it was a trick question?!) It’s simultaneously that simple—and yet that complex, too.

To qualify, as an ambassador for science fiction romance, I’m here to discuss science fiction based steampunk romance. Sometimes the lines are a bit blurry, but I leave the dissection of paranormal/fantasy based steampunk to others. So let’s dive into it, shall we?

We know all about romance. As for steampunk, a comprehensive look at its nature can be found here in Bloggers Talk Steampunk. In a nutshell, Romance + Victorian-era science fiction=Awesomesauce.

Currently, steampunk romance is more about its potential. As a reader, it’s simultaneously frustrating, because I want to read as many steampunk romances as possible Right Now, and exciting, because it’s fascinating to witness the birth of a new subgenre. Steampunk romance has so much ooh-la-la to offer readers who seek character-driven steampunk stories as well as those who crave a new twist on romance. To wit:

*Fresh, inventive settings

The Victorian era is an underexploited time period as far as romances go, and that goes double for alternate history Victorian settings. London, England? Check.The American Old West? Double-check. Mars? Triple-check!

*A shiny new set of characters

Think airship pirates, inventors, and rugged desperadoes. Think secret agents, submarine captains, and even automatons! But if you think heroines can’t play any of these characters, think again. Steampunk settings allow more latitude for heroines, especially if the worldbuilding sufficiently accounts for whichever progressive roles they inhabit. To me, this represents a creative new way authors can air out, reinvent or altogether annihilate those dusty old romance tropes.

*Unique aesthetic

The steampunk aesthetic is an intoxicating blend of old and new, shiny and sooty, brassy and grungy. Authors can introduce readers to all manner of inventions, gadgets, and accessories, many of which are stylishly integrated with simple household items such as a cane, umbrella, or pair of glasses. In other words, one pair of brass goggles to rule them all.

But hold your gears for a moment. Steampunk romance isn’t just about aesthetics. At least, I hope it’s not.There remains the question of how much theme, and how much romance to include for a story to qualify as steampunk romance (as opposed to steampunk with romantic elements). Variety is good, but rather than make the steampunk concepts a mere backdrop, I’d encourage authors to explore the various themes that make the steampunk setting so rich. There should be a reason a hero and heroine belong—and fall in love—in a steampunk age. If they can be transplanted to any other setting without a loss of plot or romance, then the author is writing the wrong story.

However, just because there are themes doesn’t mean a steampunk romance can’t be fun or lighthearted in nature. Steampunk romance can explore dystopian themes, or it can tap into the more light-hearted, action/adventure Edisonade roots of steampunk. The themes and science fictional elements may not be as prevalent as those found in traditional steampunk, but they can certainly run as deep.

Despite steampunk romance’s modest beginnings, it’s already picking up, er, steam across the pond as well. And this month, my magazine column for Germany’s romance magazine LoveLetter is part of an in-depth steampunk romance feature. Not only that, but from what I’m hearing, editors are keen to acquire it.

Where steampunk romance is heading may be as elusive as aether, but in the meantime, here is a list of books you can read now, as well as those on the horizon:

CLOCKWORK HEART—Dru Pagliassotti

Circlet Press’ Like A Wisp of Steam anthology
Cherry Tart—Angelia Sparrow & Naomi Brooks (Ellora’s Cavemen, Vol. 3)
TANGLED IN TIME—Pauline Baird Jones
STEAMED—Katie MacAlister

FULL STEAM AHEAD; MECHANICAL ROSE—Nathalie Gray

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN—Alan Moore
THE IRON DUKE—Meljean Brook (October, 2010)
WILD CARDS & IRON HORSES—Sheryl Nantus (August, 2010)
Forthcoming, as-yet-untitled steampunk romance anthology from Samhain Publishing

If you’re interested in learning more about steampunk romance as well as following news in this subgenre, come aboard The Galaxy Express where I’ll be featuring periodic updates under the title Steampunk Romance Watch.

Now, let’s break it down further. In the future, what kind of steampunk romance stories would you like to read? What types of steampunk heroes, heroines and gadgets would excite you?

Are you interested in a particular locale? What about tone, atmosphere, heat level, and themes? Would you prefer science fiction based steampunk romances, or are you interested in tales that include fantasy elements?

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Thanks, Heather!

So what do you think? Leave a comment and let us know!

And don’t forget to come back later today to check on our second guest post by Meljean Brook talking about her new series: The Iron Seas and for a chance to win a copy of CLOCKWORK HEART by Dru Pagliassotti!

It’s time for another Guest Dare – the November edition. For those new to the feature, our Guest Dare is a monthly endeavor in which we invite an unsuspecting victim to read a book totally outside of their comfort zone. You can read all previous Dare posts HERE.

This month’s victim is the fabulous Rhiannon Hart – prolific blogger and aspiring author of Young Adult fantasy. Rhiannon’s reading tastes run towards the Dystopian and Apocalyptic (sound familiar?), especially of the YA persuasion. When we contacted her for a guest dare, she came back with a laundry list of genres she’s uncomfortable towards, we (naturally) found a way to encompass multiple areas of discomfort in one book – a male protagonist, in a science fiction setting (minimal physics involved), with multiple war/thriller storylines. The book is The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, starring none other than the incomparable, indomitable Miles Vorkosigan.

Ladies and gents, please give it up for Rhiannon!

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Title: The Warrior’s Apprentice

Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

Genre: Science Fiction

Publisher: Baen
Publication Date: 1986
Paperback: 320 pages

Stand alone or series: The first book to feature Miles Vorkosigan in the ongoing Vor series and the first book published in the series, though technically the fifth story in the series. (Think Star Wars Episodes I-III versus IV-VI – The Warrior’s Apprentice is starting at episode IV)

Why did we recommend this book: After discovering this series last year, Miles Vorkosigan has become one of Thea’s favorite protagonists. And when Rhiannon mentioned her aversion to scifi, male protagonists and war/espionage thrillers, we knew immediately that Miles and his shenanigans would be able to win her over. Thus, we recommended The Warrior’s Apprentice!

Summary: (from amazon.com)
Between the seemingly impossible tasks of living up to his warrior-father’s legend and surmounting his own physical limitations, Miles Vorkosigan faces some truly daunting challenges.

Shortly after his arrival on Beta Colony, Miles unexpectedly finds himself the owner of an obsolete freighter and in more debt than he ever thought possible. Propelled by his manic “forward momentum,” the ever-inventive Miles creates a new identity for himself as the commander of his own mercenary fleet to obtain a lucrative cargo; a shipment of weapons destined for a dangerous warzone.

Rhiannon’s Review:

Miles Vorkosigan has eleven generations of proud warriors preceding him, all weighing heavily on his stunted, fragile frame. His attempt to qualify for the Barrayaran Military Service Academy and follow in his illustrious family’s footsteps fails when he breaks both legs on an obstacle course. At a loss for what to do with himself now he’ll never become an officer, he turns his attention to Elena, the beautiful daughter of his bodyguard, Sergent Bothari, to help her found out the truth about her unknown mother. A chance meeting with a jump pilot about to have his ship scrapped on Beta colony sets in motion a series of events that sees Miles become the leader of a private, imaginary army, and embroiled in a war against the Oserans.

From the very beginning of this novel I was fascinated by Miles. He’s the perfect combination of audacity, wit, ego and fragility. On a planet where defects are barely tolerated, Miles’s physical imperfection makes him even more determined to prove himself, especially to his father. His catchphrase “forward momentum” is an apt one, and combined with an overwhelming desire to help the underdog (who he is prone to identify with) he becomes embroiled in all manner of sticky situations. Outward he is austere and commanding; in private he is fraught with worry and prone to tears. I don’t know whether I want to clasp him motheringly to my breast or tongue pash him.

I was relieved at how character-driven the narrative was. I’m not a sci-fi aficionado despite all the speculative fiction I read. I get a bit lost in deep space. I really like to know how things look and where they sit in relation to one another. The problem with space is it’s mostly empty (funny that) and I can’t get a proper handle on where things are. All the worm-holing and planet-hopping that went on had me a bit baffled, and see now why it may have been a good idea to read the two preceding books in this sequence, if only to learn more about Beta and Barrayar, what they look like and where they sit in relation to Earth. While I had a hard time visualising things, the social aspects and interplanetary relations were well fleshed out. I loved the contrast between the prudish and sheltered Barrayarans and the liberal Betans. Cordelia, Miles’s mother, is from Beta and also the protagonist of the first two novels, and her exasperation with Barrayarans his highly amusing.

Overall, this is a very funny book. I had a huge grin plastered on my face the whole time I was reading it and frequently laughed out loud. Bujold is a true wit. It’s also very touching, exciting and believable. Bujold doesn’t try to tie things up too neatly. Characters with a sordid past are neither demonised nor exonerated. They just are. I will definitely be picking up the other books in this series and picking up more sci-fi in general. I think a lot of teenagers would get pleasure out of books like these, but no one seems to writing them for a mass audience at the moment. Perhaps I should try! I’ve heard whispers that after the wave of dystopian novels that is about to submerge us up to our necks in end-of-the-world scenarios (hurrah!) sci-fi will be the next big thing. I better start researching rocket fuel and air-locks.

Thanks for having me, Smugglers! This was a fantastic dare, and maybe the start of a beautiful friendship between me and deep space sci-fi.

——————–

There you have it, folks! Rhiannon is converted to the wonder that is science fiction and the awesomeness that is Miles Vorkosigan! Thanks again to Rhiannon for being a good sport, and for the fabulous review!

Next on the Guest Dare: We are actually letting you off the hook next month, as Smugglivus will be in full swing – but don’t fret! The Guest Dare will be back, with a vengeance, come 2010. If anyone is down for a challenge, feel free to email us or leave a comment here! We are always hungry for a new victim…

“Inspiration and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspiration and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Our guest today is debut author Lori Brighton. Her first book, Wild Heart (released last week by Kensington Books) is a paranormal historical romance with a bit of mystery on the side, and the first in a series. You can read more about the book here. We are happy to open the floor to the author so that she can talk about the inspiration behind the story.

Ladies and gents, Lori Brighton:

One of the most common questions an author receives is where do you get your ideas? It’s rather like asking a bird how they fly and for a brief moment there’s usually a confused pause as we frantically search for something to say. If we’re lucky a memory will come to mind, something seemingly insignificant, yet important for the basic fact that the tiny detail, that tiny moment, started the ball rolling. For my debut book, Wild Heart, that significant moment started with a children’s cartoon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start where most things start…at the beginning. I got my imagination and creativity from my mom, a woman who writes poetry and always has a book in hand. As a child I read, a lot, but I never really wanted to be a writer. The grammar rules that went along with English class bored me to tears. It didn’t stop me from making up stories in my mind. When I was upset or bored, it was the perfect time to retreat into my make-believe world. Also, growing up in a family with little money to travel, forced me to use my imagination; it was the only way I could go places. ?

Then one fateful day when I was around sixteen years old, I discovered Julie Garwood. Instantly I fell in love. England, Scotland, alpha heroes and that suspenseful adventure she does so well, all influenced how I would write my own books. I’d always been interested in history, but now it was romantic. Living in the Midwest in the U.S. I was surrounded by the Victorian Era, so its not surprising that my books often take place during this era. It’s also the time period in which one of my favorite books takes place, Jane Eyre.

You can find the influence of Charlotte’s gothic writing style in my own book. It’s also that dark, gothic style that has fueled my interest in the paranormal. I’ve always enjoyed the paranormal. I’m pretty sure we lived in a haunted house when I was a child. When I wrote Wild Heart, it seemed almost natural to add the paranormal element. I figured by adding in the paranormal, it would make it more unique.

So how did Wild Heart come about? This is going to sound odd, but the Disney Cartoon Tarzan.

My son was watching it a few years back. Around the same time, I saw a documentary on Discovery or some equally educational channel about feral children. I’d seen them both rather close together and thought, hmm, what would it be like if my hero had been lost in the wild during his childhood? And so with one little question, a book was born.

So what about you? Who or what has influenced where you are at this moment? Leave a comment. Two people will win a copy of my debut book, Wild Heart.

A big thank you to Lori Brighton and good luck to all who enter! Contest is open to US and Canada residents and runs till Saturday 14th November 11:59 PM (Pacific). Go!

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.