Scary Story

Jack Gantos writes, in Hole In My Life , about his part, at the age of 19 or 20, in a hashish-smuggling operation and how he was arrested. He describes life in prison and tells about how he started learning the craft of writing.

It's a craft he does very well. I reread the book this week, and found myself rooting for young Jack. Even though I knew what was going to happen, as I read I was thinking, "No, don't do that."

I noticed more, this second time through the book, the books Gantos was reading then and some of the writers he admires: Graham Greene's The Comedians and Baudelaire's Artificial Paradise. So now I want to look at them, and others he mentions, too: On the Yard, Papillon, The Thief's Journal, and Seven Long Times. These four he calls "jail literature," which he was reading after his trial, while he waited three weeks to be sentenced.

Until its prohibition in 1937, doctors in this country prescribed Cannabis (hashish) "in sedative mixtures for neuralgia; migraine; hysteria; neurasthenia; (and) mental excitement." (The Merck Manual of Therapeutics and Materia Medica. 6th edition. p. 1307)

Since then, millions have been imprisoned and brutalized. Gantos writes that in prison, "hatred and despair, blood and drugs... surrounded me." When he was working in the prison hospital, "a man stumbled up to the clinic with a metal needle used to inflate basketballs shoved into the crook of his arm. He had taped the clear tube of a ballpoint pen to the threaded end of the needle, and on top of that he had fixed a tennis ball. He told me he cooked the dope, poured it into the pen tube, jammed the sharpened point of the needle into his arm, attached the tennis ball, and gave it a good squeeze. The air pressure was supposed to drive the dope down through the needle and into the vein. Only it didn't work out that way. He oversqueezed the tennis ball, the air rushed down the tube, through the needle and directly into his vein, and by the time I saw him he had a quivering ball of air trapped in a vein over his biceps. Fortunately he had a belt wrapped tightly around his upper arm cutting his circulation, or he would have been dead from an embolism. I was on duty and squeezed the air back down his vein toward the puncture in his elbow. It hissed and sprayed blood as it came out. I kneaded his arm over and over until I couldn't feel any bubbles.

"'You ready?' I asked, hoping there wasn't a bubble left that might lodge in his brain. He nodded and I unsnapped the tourniquet.

"He whimpered a quick prayer, then sat there still as a statue until he figured the danger had passed."

In prison, Gantos "began to think I wouldn't make it out and, like so many guys I had helped sew up, I would take the razor and begin to hack and slice at myself as only a madman would. It wasn't a new thought for me to think I might go insane, but I had always pushed the thought aside. This time the thought that I'd kill myself was unrelenting. As my hand began to shake I knew I was a moment away from hurting myself. I dove toward my cell door as if from the path of a speeding train. I shoved the razor out of the meal slot then dropped down and did push-ups until I couldn't do any more and lay there stretched out on the hard floor feeling the warmth of my body replaced by the cold of the concrete.

"By the time the count guard came by I was sitting on my bunk, half shaved and trying to will my shaking foot into a shoe."

So how did Jack Gantos start learning how to write like this? Keeping a journal helped. "I read the book (Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov) first. Then I began to record my own lines between his lines... I had plenty to write about.

"I set my journal up differently than I had my others. On each page I started writing between the lines and then broke out and wrote all crazy around the margins and every which way I could find some space so that it was all jumbled up. I tossed in everything I saw and thought and felt during the day and wrapped it all up with book quotes and prison slang and bits of wild conversation, and anything I thought was interesting..."

"My struggle as a writer was a lot like my life... I made up rules for myself and broke them and made others until I got it right."

In Hole In My Life he got it right.

You might be a witch...

It's late, but I just read this, and it freaked me out. I mean, in addition to working in a bookstore, I also teach English. I assign stories and books (and comics) that I find interesting, that I can use to explain various concepts...

And, while I assume that most students won't like some of the things I assign, I never thought I might get set on fire.

But beyond that, this hits kind of close to home. Now, before I explain what I mean, a little caveat: my friends know this about me, but it's not something I share a lot. Frankly, it makes me look a little strange. Then again, I was a weird kid.

That being said, The Crucible holds a very special place for me. When I was in tenth grade, there was a two month block where every day after school I would come home, read the last scene of the play while listening to Cyndi Lauper sing "True Colors," and bawl--just sob from someplace deep down.

I don't know that I can explain it, but somewhere in the confluence of a man trying to hold onto some final shred of personal dignity in the face of a system so hellbent on crushing every last thing he holds dear--somewhere between that and the incredibly soulful, desperate sounds of Lauper's voice? Right there is where I found something larger than myself. That's how I figured out that there are ideas larger than me worth holding out for. That knowledge kicked my ass, and it still does today.

I guess when I think about it like that? That's something worth teaching, the magic of literature. And as for the people who write books, who talk about books, who think that books have meaning? If that makes us witches, then so be it.

(credit where credit is due, dept.: I found that cover of The Crucible on this cool blog.)

Update: fixed broken link.

Fall into Mystery

Call it a Whodunit x 2. Or perhaps a Two-dunit. Or even a Who-DUO-nit. Okay, maybe not. I'll stop with the puns. But whatever you choose to call it, there's an autumn chill in the air—and you'll get even more of a chill from two gripping murder mysteries that provide a bit of a twist on the usual mystery mold.

Macbeth--the Shakespeare version—has its share of murder, mayhem, and mystery, so it makes sense that the Bard's old standby might inspire a modern-day whodunit. In Alan Gratz's Something Wicked, fans of his first book will be pleased to see the return of Horatio Wilkes. Horatio himself, though, is somewhat less than pleased at having to spend half a week at the Scottish Highland Fair with his friend Mac, who's been acting pretty weird ever since he got together with the bewitching Beth. (Just take the word "bewitching," remove a few letters, and add a "Y," and you'll have a pretty good idea of what she's like.)

And then poor Horatio stumbles upon Duncan MacRae lying dead in his tent in a pool of blood. At first there's an obvious suspect—Duncan's son, who would stand to inherit substantial land upon his father's death. But in the world of feuding Scottish clans, with scheming and swindling going on left and right, it's hard to know who's to blame and who's merely a pawn.

If you know the story of Macbeth, you'll probably have a pretty good idea who's the guilty party—but you're also likely to get a kick out of how Gratz has adapted the various Shakespeare characters to fit a modern-day setting. Horatio's narrative voice is funny, and there's a lot of humor as well as good old tension and mystery. Even if you're a Macbeth expert, don't dismiss it as a rehashing of the play—the story may be inspired by Macbeth, but it's original and engaging as well as just a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

For something a little grittier, there's Dooley Takes the Fall by Norah McClintock, an award-winning Canadian mystery/crime author. Well, let's say a lot grittier. Ryan Dooley is seventeen years old and already an alumnus of the juvenile detention facility. For now, though, he's trying to keep his head down and his ass out of trouble. He lives with his uncle, an ex-cop, works evenings at a video store, and is just trying to make it to the end of high school.

He means well, but sometimes it's difficult to keep his mouth shut when he thinks something isn't right. And there are times when trouble just seems to gravitate in his direction, like the universe knows he's a screwup. One night, walking home from work, he decides to take a detour through a ravine, under a bridge. He looks up, and a body falls from the bridge. He runs over, but it's too late—by the time he gets there, the guy is dead. But it doesn't look good for Dooley. He's already got mistakes on his record, and moreover, the dead guy was someone Dooley knew.

Of course, there's nothing anyone can pin on him for this situation, which could well have been an accident. But something doesn't feel right about it. And Dooley can't help being curious, even as the police are keeping an even closer eye on him. The tension just keeps escalating as Dooley finds himself more and more wrapped up in the mystery—and the more he finds out, the less certain he is about whom he can trust. Edgy and gripping, this one is a page-turner, and I was rooting for the well-intentioned Dooley the whole way.

These reviews will also be cross-posted at Readers' Rants.

Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel

Based on the video game, soon to be a major motion picture... eh, forget all that. Prince of Persia purports to be the legend behind the game, but any knowledge of this graphic novel's origins are completely unnecessary. What we have here is a great, multi-layered tale of power and and palace intrigue over the course of centuries, a story rich in Eastern myths and torn allegiances.

In the 9th century city of Marv, the warrior Saman has not only conquered but rebuilt the city in great splendor. Among his children, the twin brother and sister Guiv and Guilan, he has adopted Layth, the orphaned son of his enemy, and raised them as equals. Growing up together they vow strength in unity and insist on ruling as one when their time comes. The problem is that Guilan and Layth have fallen in love and that Guiv becomes an outcast when he tries to kill Layth in his sleep...

The 9th century blends with the 13th century where Shirin, daughter of the current ruler of Marv, leaves a palace that has become the home of decadence and lies to discover the truths that have been hidden from her. After nearly drowning in a well Shirin is rescued and taken to a citadel that is the secret home to Ferdos, who relates the stories of the past to her. The tales of two centuries echo each other as we learn of the rise of two princes, and how the power of the desert city is in the hands of those who control the waterways that have been built from ancient springs.

The thing about Prince of Persia, the element I long for in graphic novels, is the sense of the novel. It isn't merely a question of length, but when a story is rich in character and story threads, that's what pulls me in. I want to get lost in a story, in a time and place, and to know that the storyteller is weaving an elaborate tapestry. For me, it's part of what separates a comic from a graphic novel, this feeling of story heft, and Prince of Persia has it in spades.

I can't ignore how location resonates between the story and our own lives. How different are the days when an elite group of people controlled the means of survival for a larger community? Does it matter that it was water in the 9th and 12th centuries and oil in the 20th and 21st? Is the ancient Persian empire, no matter what it is called today or in the future, destined to be where all of our international battles for power will be set?

I read somewhere (advance word from Publisher's Weekly perhaps?) that the graphic novel wouldn't be as successful for its intended gamer audience because it lacked the interactive element of the game. Excuse me? Are gamers really the only audience for this book? should think not. And are gamers so limited in their abilities that unless a book based on a game is interactive like a game they couldn't appreciate it? That makes no sense, it sells gamers short, and totally ignores what a separate experience the book is from the game.

What we have here is reminiscent of great Eastern myths and storytelling. It may play off familiar images from what most people know of Arabian Nights stories, it has some magic and mythical qualities (no genies, however, but earth- and animal-based magic), but also has some grounding in the real world. In the 12th century the city of Merv was briefly the largest in the world, built on an oasis along the Silk Road, and no doubt a place where stories and myths were built around the tales of travelers in the region. It does not seem out of place that the stories included in Prince of Persia could have sprung from the ancient city of Merv.

My simple wish to those who can grant it: More like this, please.


Prince of Persia
Created by Jordan Mechner
Written by A.B. Sina
Artwork by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland
First Second

How to Annoy Your Science Teacher

Scientists can be so smug. Maybe they have reason to be. After all, their methods, observations and theories are responsible for the vast knowledge we twenty-first century humans have about the universe and ourselves. Still, nobody likes smugness, even if it's justified. And when that smugness rubs off on your science teacher, or worse yet, those lab partners at the next station over whose experiments always seem to produce the perfect data, the smugness gets downright intolerable.

Michael Brooks's, 13 Things That Don't Make Sense might wipe a little of it away. Taken as a whole, the book presents a world where scientists are sometimes simply baffled, scratching their heads like sophomore chemistry students who can't get their hydrolysis experiment to behave. Sometimes the scientists just cheat, hiding or changing data so as not to look incompetent, or in agreement with people disgraced as hacks. And sometimes they just muddle along, as when they perform experiments on and form vast hypotheses on something they haven't yet even bothered to define, such as "life." But most importantly, Brooks describes a scientific world which generally is doing exactly what it is supposed to, uncovering big scary questions, the answers to which could radically alter our understanding of everything we thought we knew. His thesis is that, in these thirteen areas at least, science is may be confused because it stands on the brink of a massive paradigm shift not unlike those ushered in by Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein.


Brooks has a number of purposes in exploring the anomalies that baffle science. For one, he wants show just how limited our knowledge is, but he also wants to explore the steps scientists take to free themselves from difficult quandaries. On a more practical level, he demonstrates the limits of science's techniques and the flaws of the people who practice them, but he also suggests how tenaciously scientists' struggle to live up to their tasks. Finally, and most importantly he wants to show that science, far from being in a stable state, a place to turn to for absolute answers, is always, and especially at this moment in time, actually an institution ripe for revolution, and more productive at generating questions than answers. He looks at the placebo effect, both in its power to heal and in its potential to mess up double-blind testing of new drugs, questioning medicine's faith in these tests. He sees sex as a mystery, not in how it's done, but in how pervasive it is, when, according to evolutionary theory, it really shouldn't be. He looks at death (or, really, aging that results in death) and why it should exist, since in some species, such as the Blanding Turtle, it doesn't, challenging scientists to find a way around aging in humans. He examines an individual signal from outer space, the WOW! signal, which matches exactly what we predict an alien species looking to make contact might send, scolding the American government to cutting funding to SETI research. And he explores the history of cold fusion and homeopathy, each of which work experimentally at least some of the time even though they fit no known theoretical framework and are generally thought of as territory for crackpots.

In two instances he even treads on ground generally reserved for philosophy, trying to find a definition for "life" (there isn't a perfect one) and exploring the "illusion" of free will (experiments show that our minds actually attach purpose to our actions after the fact). Even here he maintains firm footing on what observation and experimentation can tell us, disappointing armchair philosophers like myself by avoiding rabbit hole discussions of metaphysics.

Brooks opens his book with a discussion of dark matter, perhaps the most troubling enigma of our time. "We can only account for 4% of the universe," he claims. Scientists can measure the amount of stuff in the universe, or in a section of it, like a galaxy, in two ways. One is to measure how much light it radiates or reflects (light, to these scientists includes the whole spectrum, from infrared to visible light to x-rays and gamma rays). Most matter that we know of ought to either reflect or radiate light. The other way is to measure how gravity effects the matter. Gravity will act very differently on a galaxy with more mass than one with less. When scientists compare these two measures, they're not even close. The mass measurement says there are many times more matter in the universe than the measurement based on light. Scientists are at a loss to account for this difference. Either they don't understand matter like they thought they did (lots of stuff must not reflect or radiate light) or they don't understand gravity the way they thought they did. Or both.

Brooks is at his best in the dark matter discussion, lucidly explicating both the science and the culture of the scientist. He follows several of the paths down which scientists have hopefully and fruitlessly trod--the search for WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles); a modified understanding of gravity labeled MOND; the multi-dimensional mathematics of super-string theory; the further compounding introduction of dark matter's sister, dark energy--in attempts to solve this gargantuan puzzle. All of these theories show promise, none has yielded anything like an answer. But something, sooner or later, has to give. When (or if) the question of dark matter is finally answered, our understanding of the physical universe will radically change.


13 Things That Don't Make Sense stands apart from other popular science books in that it addresses the culture of theoretical and experimental science, shooting holes in science's too-good opinion of itself, even as it elucidates science's accomplishments and discoveries. As such it is more than a primer. Imagine the power this book will give you in class. The opportunity, for instance, to derail a physics lecture on gravity with a suggestion that, according to the Pioneer probe trajectories, gravity is all wrong once you leave our solar system, or the chance to protest a biology test based on the fact that we don't even know what life is. Depending on your teacher's disposition, you'll either impress her or annoy her. Either way, you win.

Graphic Classics: Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce

There are cynics, and there are cynics. And then there's Bierce.

Ambrose Bierce is probably best known today for "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which everyone eventually encounters in high school English class. And it's a good snapshot of what Bierce does best: a story of a single event, filled with snapshot detail, set in the Civil War and ending with a bitter, cynical twist. But it's only the tip of the Bierceberg.

Bierce served in Union Army during the Civil War until he was wounded in Georgia. His stories set during the conflict, sprinkled with details from his own experiences, make Shelby Foote look like Nicholas Sparks. In this excerpt from the short story "Chickamauga," a six-year-old child encounters a retreating soldier:

He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride. The man sank upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw--from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry. The man rose to his knees, the child to his feet. The man shook his fist at the child; the child, terrified at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon the farther side of it and took a more serious view of the situation.

(Unfortunately this story is not included in the Graphic Classics, but those interested can read it online here. It contains a typical Bierce twist at the end.)

Or consider this entry from his "Devil's Dictionary," included in the Graphic Classics edition with full-page illustrations by Steven Cerio (one is also used for the cover):

OCEAN: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man--who has no gills.

or this one:

BAIT: A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

Graphic Classics has re-issued their original Bierce collection with 70 pages of new material, including adaptations of "The Damned Thing" (a personal favorite), "Moxon's Master" (true science fiction, although the illustrations by Stan Shaw seem to work against the story's intent) and a long, beautifully drawn (by Carlo Vergara) take on "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter," which Bierce translated from the original German. There's also a rib-tickling bio of Bierce, illustrated with irreverence by Dan E. Burr (look for the cameo characters in some of the crowd scenes).

Most importantly, the adaptations retain the bitter heart of their source. Some of the prose may be a bit dated to a modern teen reader, but such archness was often deliberate, a way to mock the seriousness of "literary" writing. Bierce had see the worst humanity had to offer and, when faced with the choice to laugh or cry, chose instead to snort derisively. Time cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite misanthropy.

Not Just Gross But Actually Scary Horror Books

• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. All the proof you need that carnivals are evil.


• House by Josh Simmons (graphic novel). This wordless descent into horror follows three teens as they explore a creepy old house and follow their curiosity just far enough to lose themselves forever.


• The Boys are Back in Town by Christopher Golden. A high school reunion reveals dark secrets and unexpected terror amongst a group of friends. Time travel comes into play soon enough, and as things keep changing, only one guy remembers what really happened versus what everyone else "remembers" happening. Head-tripping horror.


• The Last Apprentice: The Revenge of the Witch, Book One by Joseph Delaney. As the seventh son of a seventh son, it is twelve-year old Thomas Ward's duty to apprentice to the local spook. The job - to rid the county of witches, ghouls, and other things that go bump in the night.


• World War Z by Max Brooks. Written as a collection of personal accounts gathered several years after humanity suffers through and survives a virus that turns much of the population into mindless, flesh eating zombies. Brooks goes well beyond the usual takes on the subject and provides a range of stories, from touching personal accounts to explorations of the political and military implications of the crisis. Don't worry; it's plenty gross enough, too, if you're into that.


• The Shining by Stephen King. You have to read King if you're going to read horror and this is a great one to start with. You've got a terrified kid, a crazy parent and an abandoned hotel in the Colorado mountains during winter. If you ever wondered why it is important to formulate an escape route NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE, this book shows you why. Better than the movie; I promise.


• Soulless by Christopher Golden. If you like zombie movies or supernatural stories, you will LOVE Soulless. It's so action-packed that I've taken to calling it a movie bound in a book. I love its exploration of family ties, and the questions it raised: Do we want to see our loved ones again after they pass away? If they return as zombies, unlike their living selves, would they be better left to rest in peace? And the book's climax - wow. Trust me, you'll devour this book in one sitting.


• Coraline by Neil Gaiman. (Available in the original novel format or as a graphic novel illustrated by P. Craig Russell) Imagine a parallel universe in which all things are the corrupt creation of an Other Mother, an ominous, ageless being who wants to claim your soul and sew buttons for your eyes. Now guess what happens when she wants you to come live with her - forever....


• Night Shift by Stephen King. Short stories from a master of horror. From "Jerusalem's Lot" with its Satan's Mass and Nosferatu to "The Woman in the Room" with its plodding medical patients, this one will keep your stomach muscles firmly clenched.


• The Restless Dead: Ten Original Stories of the Supernatural ed. by Deborah Noyes. Stories of the undead: ghosts, vampires, zombies, necromancers and more from ten different authors. Find out why graverobbing is a bad idea, read a new twist on The Tell-Tale Heart, and more.


• Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. In his well-known poem "The Raven," an ominous bird perches within the room; the man within it will have peace "nevermore." But don't miss "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado." For creepiness, Poe just can't be beat.


• Peeps by Scott Westerfeld. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy gets infected. Boy helps save the world.


• The Sandman, Volume 4: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman (graphic novel). The Lord of Dreams travels to Hell and back--literally--encountering myths come to life and horrors unimaginable. If you can think of anything scarier than the Corinthian--a monster with two vicious mouths where his eyes should be--I don't want to hear about it.


• American Supernatural Tales edited by S.T. Joshi. From the burgeoning beginning of the genre (with Irving and Hawthorne), through its most hallowed practitioners (Poe and Lovecraft), along its sturdy backbone (Matheson and King) and into those with the freshest new takes (Ligotti and Kiernan), this is the best exploration of horror's history and themes around. There's something eerie, disgusting or downright terrifying in here for every taste.

Heart-Shaped Box -- Joe Hill

Fifty-four-year-old metal icon Jude Coyne has mostly settled down. He lives in a rambling old farmhouse with his current girlfriend (one in a long line of much-younger-than-him Goth fans) and his two dogs, Angus and Bon.

Jude has a collection. A hangman's noose (used), a 300-year-old witch's confession, a trepanned skull, a snuff film... Most of the items in the collection were sent to him by fans, but when his personal assistant brings this online auction item to his attention, Jude can't resist:

I will "sell" my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder. Of course a soul cannot really be sold, but I believe he will come to your house and abide with you if you put out the welcome mat. As I said, when he died, he was with us temporarily and had no place to call his own, so I am sure he would go to where he was wanted. Do not think this is a stunt or a practical joke and that I will take your money and send you nothing. The winning bidder will have something solid to show for their investment. I will send you his Sunday suit. I believe if his spirit is attached to anything, it has to be that.

When the suit arrives in a black heart-shaped box, it's almost immediately apparent that the sale wasn't a scam. The ghost has arrived, is there to stay, and is anything but benign.

I like to work more spooky books into my schedule once fall begins, and Heart-Shaped Box was a good way to kick the new season off. The ghost was creepy as all get out, with black scribbles over his eyes and a jerky, spliced-film way of moving. The story itself was constantly surprising. It twisted and turned and kept me a little off-kilter all the way through (which, in my opinion, is a good thing in a spooky book). I'm not all that well-versed in the metal genre, but even I recognized a lot of the references -- I'm sure that someone more knowledgeable would find lots more.

The Big Showdown at the End didn't work for me all that well -- it felt a little cheesy, a little too Beetlejuice in a book that had felt much creepier until then. It's interesting, too, that up until the very end, I enjoyed the characters but didn't feel as if I'd become at all attached to them -- but the epilogue section made me realize how much affection I'd developed and how much I'd been rooting for them. So while it wasn't a perfect read, I enjoyed it quite a lot, and I'll definitely be picking up Joe Hill's book of short stories.

Review- Poison Ink by Christopher Golden

Poison Ink by Christopher Golden
From the back cover:

"Sammi, TQ, Caryn, Letty, and Katsuko are floaters. None of them fits in with any particular group at Covington High School—except each other. One night, to cement their bond, the girls decide to get matching, unique tattoos. But when Sammi backs out at the last minute, everything changes. Faster than you can say "airbrush," Sammi is an outcast, and soon, her friends are behaving like total strangers. When they attack Sammi for trying to break up a brawl, Sammi spies something horrible on her friends' backs: the original tattoo has grown tendrils, snaking and curling over the girls' entire bodies. What has that creepy tattoo artist done to her friends? And what—if anything—can Sammi do to get them back?"

I was told that I absolutely must read this book by Little Willow once she knew that I had gotten this book from Random House. When I first started out, I was beginning to wonder just what exactly LW saw in Golden's prose. The book in the beginning was not terribly compelling, but about halfway through the book is where it got to be a page-turner, and that ending more than made up for the almost lackluster start. I was seriously on the edge of my seat during the entire second half and couldn't stop reading until I got to the end. The variety of characters in this book is also worth mentioning; Golden takes these five friends and makes them completely different and easily distinguishable from each other, hopefully giving each reader at least one of them to relate to. But these aren't the only ones- many of the other characters are also fully fleshed out. A really good read, and not too expensive as it's a paperback original.

Sometime this weekend, Little Willow and I will be doing another He Said, She Said blog for Poison Ink. This will be Part 1 of our Christopher Golden He Said, She Said posts. Part 2 will be later this month and focus on Golden's upcoming book Soulless, which will be out on Oct. 21. If you want to read Little Willow's review of Poison Ink, click here.

Author Interview--Jennifer Bradbury

Jennifer Bradbury's debut novel, Shift, is about two graduating high school seniors who ride their bicycles across the United States, but only one of them returns. It's a story about friendship, adventure, and independence-- full of mystery and intrigue.

Recently Jennifer and I discussed her novel along with what's next for her and even her experiences on the game show Jeopardy. Here then is our discussion.

Carter: How did you go about putting yourself in the mindset of two high
school boys? Were there any particular challenges and how did you go about addressing these?

Jennifer: As scary as it was to try, writing from a male point of view was actually a lot easier than I expected. I owe a lot of that to the fact that I spent several summers working at a boys camp in North Carolina, where sometimes my coworkers and campers forgot I was a girl. And teaching high school guys certainly helped. But most of all, I think the big ideas at the heart of the book are ones that transcend gender. In that respect, the really important stuff came easily. In the end though, my favorite compliment came from my brother in law, who read an early draft of the manuscript before submission and wrote to tell me: "I always knew you'd make a great guy." So I guess there's a little bit about the way I communicate or see the world that naturally lent itself to these characters.

C: How much of your own journey across the U.S. were you able to include in the book? Did any of the people you met along the way work themselves into Shift?

J: I'd say more than half of the incidents on the road are based on experiences I had when touring. We did spend a night in jail very much like the one the characters experience, fell into some odd church services, and honestly got chased by a coyote. The really fun part of writing this book was synthesizing these incidents in a meaningful way that served the story. And there were a lot of other stories that didn't make the cut!

C: Why young adult novels? How'd you get here?

J: I fell in love with YA when I started teaching high school English and was desperate to get my kids reading. And I'd always loved writing but never entertained the thought of writing fiction until my husband suggested that I'd read so many novels that I must have reached some sort of critical mass and needed to express it somehow. It was several more years after that moment that I tried my hand at writing one.

C: In Shift, it seems that the landscape of the United States plays
such an important role in the book. How did you go about picking the places where you focused on in the writing?

J: A lot of that route is borrowed from the same one my husband and his best friend took when they graduated high school. And I think they chose it because the southern route would have been too hot in the summertime. But I did alter the route a little, while still trying to get them to their destination as quickly as possible. I went in knowing I wanted a few things to happen in specific places, wanted to write a little bit about the area where I live, and wanted each setting to play off what was happening with the lives of the characters. I'm pleased it worked out the way it did.

C: In Shift, we're virtually in Chris' head the whole time. But there
was so much to Win that I want to know more about. There was so much more to his story. Any thoughts on doing a follow-up novel centered on Win?

J: Thanks! I have thought about doing some kind of spin-off, but I'm definitely not ready to write it now. But revisiting Win and the girl he meets toward the end of the story feels like something I might try one day.

C: Who are some of your favorite authors? Books? and perhaps could you fill us in on one particular influence?

J: I love Chris Crutcher. The way his books still stand up and endure in popularity and substance is such a testament to his talent and respect for his readers. I'm also devouring just about everything I can find by Kenneth Oppel and Markus Zusak. And I love Joan Bauer, Laurie Halse Anderson, and too many others to list. And before I discovered YA, I adored all the stuff I was ever asked to read for my English courses—particularly Dickens, Austen, and Charlotte Bronte. And I've a big crush on Flannery O'Connor's stories and novels. On our bike trip across the south, I insisted we detour through Milledgeville so I could take a picture of her old home and check out the reading room at the college library there.

C: What's next?

J: My second book for Atheneum is titled APART (2009). It deals with a family dealing with the fallout of a father's mental illness. And I just sold another book to Atheneum tentatively titled WRAPPED (2010). That one's a big sidestep for me into historical fiction. I'm describing it as Jane Austen meets ALIAS meets Indiana Jones. With mummies.

C: Tell me about your Jeopardy experience. What was Alex like? What was the winning question?

J: Its funny that that ended up on the book jacket, but I think my editor knew it would be something quirky people might latch on to. Jeopardy was a lot of fun. It was all such a lark, and I got very nervous, and was very surprised when I won, but it was a blast. Alex was very, very nice and when the tape wasn't rolling he was joking around with a group of school kids in the audience.
I missed the final Jeopardy question on both days, but on the first day, the other players did as well. I don't recall the exact wording, but on the first show the answer was Captain Bligh and on the second it was Vaseline. That day I had no clue and wrote a little shout out to my college roommate and ended up looking very silly.

C: Any advice for potential authors out there reading?

J: I don't know enough yet to give any advice other than the standard stuff: read a ton, write for the sake of writing, and tell the stories that won't let you ignore them.
Thanks Jen for the great interview. Good luck with what's next.