Dr. Fell and the Playground of DOOM

Happy Book Birthday to David Neilsen and Dr. Fell!

And Now for the Review

Dr. Fell and the Playground of DOOM is creepy, funny, and perfect middle-grade horror for those kids with a taste for the dark side (Hmmm, tastes like chicken). 

Dr. Fell arrives in the quiet neighborhood of Hardscrabble Street, takes over a long abandoned home, and turns the front yard into the titular playground overnight. The local children are seduced by the endless adventures offered by the playground as it takes the shape of whatever they imagine it to be – rockets, castles, pirate ships, climbing walls, mad tea parties, catacombs, etc. The kids love it, even when the injuries start piling up – sometimes grave trauma. But injuries are no problem for the doctor, who swoops in and performs miraculous feats of medicine behind the closed doors of the formerly abandoned house. In no time, Dr. Fell mesmerizes the entire town (including the parents!), and it's up to the heroic efforts of the three main characters to somehow save the day from Dr. Fell and his ancient horrors.

Author Neilsen's background in storytelling and theater shows in the language which lends itself to quality read-a-loud activities for families, libraries, and schools. This book will find a home among shelves cluttered with R.L. Stine, David Lubar, Adam Gidwitz, and Neil Gaiman.

Just be sure to have a night light handy. 

The Interview Portion of Our Entertainment

How did this story come to you? It's your first book for kids. Did it start out that way, or did you realize that when you were into it?

David Neilsen

The idea for the book came from an illustration by the late children’s illustrator Trina Schart Hyman. It had been hanging on the wall of my in-laws’ for years before I ever really looked at it.  It shows a man in a suit and top hat leering down at a little girl, who looks back at him suspiciously. The man has a large basket strapped to his back out of which are sticking various arms, legs, and heads of little children. It’s labeled “Dr. Fell” and Hyman drew it when asked to create an image from her favorite fable or fairy tale. Curious, I looked up Dr. Fell online and discovered the four-line poem written in 1680 which I’ve included at the beginning of my book.

I loved the picture, and right away all sorts of questions jumped into my head. Who is this guy? What is he doing? What happens when he comes to town? The story began to take form when I went about answering these questions.

From the start, I knew this was a book for kids. It’s actually my second book. My first book, which has yet to be published, caught the attention of an agent who took me on as a Middle Grade/YA author, so I’d already started down the path of writing Middle-Grade fiction when I began to put this story together.

How does your storytelling experience inform your writing? Do you read your work aloud as you draft?

My storytelling and my writing are two sides of the same coin. I have brought stories I’ve written into my work as a storyteller, and have taken stories I crafted as performance pieces and sold them as short stories. I have a theater background, so I do tend to read my work aloud when I’m going over it, to make sure it reads well and isn’t too clunky. I have always read aloud to my kids at night, and I like to think that parents will read my book aloud to their kids. I keep that in mind as I write, and make sure that everything flows the way I want it to. I teach a writing workshop for kids through Writopia Labs and always advise my students to read their work aloud, even if alone in their room, because you may realize that what looks good on the page may not actually sound good out loud.

What horror authors for kids have influenced you? 

Obviously, when you think of children’s horror, you think of R.L. Stine, and while I’ve read several Goosebumps books. I’m more partial to horror of the mind, rather than jump scares and gore. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Coraline are two fantastically creepy tales. I also liked Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener. Recently, I devoured Claire Legrand’s amazing novel, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls. I loved the truly disturbing descriptions of the home itself, as well as the darkness into which the plot descends. A great book.

What were the challenges of bringing a Lovecraftian themed story to life in a middle-grade book?

I think Lovecraftian themes are perfect for Middle Grade. Behind the tentacles and the madness inherent within Lovecraft’s work is the overarching theme of Forbidden Knowledge--the truth is worse than you could imagine and there is a terrible price to be paid for learning what you should not have learned. Children at this age are spreading their wings, as it were and their worlds are becoming larger by the second. Our job as parents is to guide that learning in the right directions. With Dr. Fell, there is obviously a terrible secret to uncover, but at what cost? The children are definitely changed by their experience and encounter with Dr. Fell, but changed for the better?

And then, of course, I did have to have some sort of tentacles in there as well. Because I love tentacles.

Is there a sequel?

While there’s nothing officially in development, I think a lot about a sequel. It took me a long time to figure out how to best craft a sequel without breaking the rules I set up in this book. I wasn’t entirely sure one existed. But things fell into place, and I figured out what I wanted to do, and so I’ve started putting notes in order and writing a few chapters. My next book is a stand-alone novel coming next August tentatively titled Beyond the Doors. And I’ve written another book after that also not related to Dr. Fell. But I do hope to return to the bad doctor sooner rather than later. I’m excited to the tell the next chapter of his story.

Cthulhu for President?

Isn’t he already running? I once saw a banner online which read something along the lines of “I’m voting for Cthulhu so that he’ll devour my soul last.” If Cthulhu wins humanity loses, but if you support him, you’ll get a few more days to live. Eating humanity takes time.

Dr. Fell on Tour

David and Dr. Fell are the making the rounds of several other blogs. Here's the list for those that to learn more about the book, the author, and the Evil Dr. Fell. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Date	Blog
8/1/16	My Brain on Books
8/2/16	The Boy Reader
8/3/16	Fandom Monthly Magazine
8/4/16	Batch of Books
8/5/16	The Book's the Thing
8/6/16	books4yourkids
8/7/16	Book Monsters
8/8/16	Middle Grade Ninja
8/9/16	Project Middle Grade Mayhem
8/10/16	The Children's Book Review
8/11/16	Seraphina Reads
8/12/16	5 Girls Book Reviews
8/13/16	I'm Shelf-ish
8/14/16	Books Complete Me
8/15/16	Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers
8/16/16	Books, Movies, Reviews. Oh My!
8/17/16	The Book Report Network: Kidsreads
8/18/16	YABooksCentral.com
8/19/16	Kid Lit Reviews
8/20/16	Book Blather
8/21/16	Word Spelunking
8/22/16	Reader Girls
8/23/16	The Book Wars
8/24/16	Cracking the Cover
8/25/16	Blackplume
8/26/16	MARGIE'S MUST READS
8/27/16	Ms. Yingling Reads
8/28/16	Carina Books

Chris Eboch on The Thrill of Horror and Things that Go Bump in the Night

This post is adapted from an article that was originally published in Children's Writer. Publishing professionals' titles have been updated when possible.

For many people, Halloween is a favorite holiday. It’s a chance to get dressed up, taking on a different persona for a while (something writers do all the time). It’s a holiday that focuses on fun – candy, costumes, tricks – with any religious background largely lost to modern thought. And it’s a time to get scared, but in a safe, playful way.

From ghost stories around the campfire to summer slasher flicks, many people enjoy being scared. Children and teenagers are no exception. “Growing up is intrinsically horrific,” author Cynthia Leitich Smith says. “You’re a shape-shifter in your changing body. You’re a vampire in your thirst for life. Your emotions can turn you from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Essentially, gothic fantasy is all about reflecting this reality through metaphor that asks the hard questions, tackles the classic themes, but in a fresh – sometimes bloody fresh – and sometimes funny way.”

Many authors are drawn to this genre because of their own childhood love of the macabre. “As a kid, I adored anything scary – ghosts, monsters, mummies, you name it,” Laura Ruby says. “So, when I sat down to write my own books, I wrote the ones I would have liked to read when I was a kid.”

Who could resist the chance to tell scary stories for enthusiastic fans? But it’s not enough to throw together a bunch of ghosts or monsters. Horror stories have been around since prehistoric people tried to explain the things that go bump in the night. For authors to catch a reader’s attention today, they have to do something different.
 

“Horror has its quintessential themes,” Leitich Smith adds. “The key is in your twist or twisted retelling. In crafting Tantalize, I drew my initial inspiration from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker’s classic includes a Texan, Quincy P. Morris, among its original vampire hunters. I brought the mythology ‘home’ to Texas, offering my new protagonist, Quincie P. Morris – an updated and gender-flipped nod to Stoker’s old school.”

Ideas can come from everywhere, including real-life facts or mysteries. Ruby wrote Lily’s Ghosts based on stories a friend told her about her family’s “haunted” house.

The Monsters Among Us

With so many human monsters in the real world (not to mention dangerous beasts, scary diseases, and the basic fear of death), readers may find it easy to believe in fictional monsters. Still, horror stories need a grounding in reality. Human characters should be realistically human, points out agent Ashley Grayson. “No juvenile novel today can omit cell phones, the Internet, and the new relationships kids have. As one teen told us: ‘No girl I know would go anywhere without her friends and certainly not into the woods. If she did have to go alone, she’d IM or SMS her friends the whole time.’ Ask yourself, would this story be scary if the protagonist could make a cell call to his/her best friends within moments?”

Fantastical elements should ring true as well. “Monsters, ghosts, supernatural creatures of any kind should be described in the same sort of physical detail that any human would,” Ruby says. “They should also have distinct personalities, personal tics, etc., to round them out.”

Andrew Karre, Executive editor at Dutton Books for Young Readers, says, “I think the impact of good horror/suspense writing is directly proportional to the author’s ability to describe scenes, situations, and characters in surprising yet evocative ways. How can you translate whatever gruesome thing you’ve conjured up in your imagination into words that seem simultaneously surprising and true?”

Susan Van Metre, Senior Vice President and Publisher at Abrams Books for Young Readers, concedes that, “Perhaps there’s more of an emphasis on fun and a little less concern about logic than for other sorts of books.” However, believability benefits “when the fear or concept has some basis in reality. Peni R. Griffin wrote The Ghost Sitter about a girl killed in a firework accident (didn’t we all worry about that growing up, after all our parents’ dire warnings) who haunts her suburban home until a family with a girl her age moves in, and the girl helps free her. So it became a wonderful novel about the power of friendship to reach across a seemingly impossible divide.”

Yet there’s no point in writing horror if you’re not going to make it spooky. “Mood and atmosphere appeal to me as a reader,” Candlewick Senior Editor Deborah Noyes Wayshak says. “I want to go where angels fear to tread, but you have to coax me there.”

The best horror also goes beyond the merely spooky or grotesque, and touches some deep truth. “The most engaging horror or ghost stories are psychologically complex,” Wayshak says. “The horror or ‘haunting’ reflects the protagonist’s psyche in some way, what she or he is hiding or suffering or grieving on the mundane plane.”

To find these deeper truths authors must be emotionally honest and willing to take risks. “The main challenge is writing into the heart of the horror – what’s on the page, what’s inside oneself – without protecting or skirting or offering apologies,” Leitich Smith says. “The challenge is in unleashing your own monster within.”

Growing Up Scared

Children of all ages might enjoy horror, but they don’t enjoy the same kinds of horror. Stories for younger children tend to balance fear with humor. Plots are spooky but not terrifying. Teen novels, on the other hand, can include more gore and death. Writers have to find the right balance for their books.

“The youngest readers are more likely to enjoy what you might call the ‘gotcha!’ scares,” says Joshua Gee, author of Encyclopedia Horrifica. “Middle-graders want to be surprised on every page, but not necessarily terrified. And finally, younger kids usually prefer a little humor with their horror. Goosebumps is a great example.”

Grayson points out that different age groups have different fears. “The scariest thing for a 12-year-old is the idea their parents might die. Typical YAs almost hope they would, so most YAs are fearful of loss of social capital or that their boy/girlfriend is a psycho or vampire.”

According to Van Metre, “YA novels are pretty limitless in the amount of gore; one would try to soften this or have it happen ‘off-stage’ for middle grade readers. Also, the occasional bleak ending is okay for teens; not so much for middle graders.”

Does the world really need more monsters? Maybe so, if scary books can help young people deal with real life. “One of my all-time favorite books is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak,” Gee says. “It introduced me to my first monsters – and taught me how to make friends with them. I think that’s the role of scary literature in a kid’s life. It provides a safe and neutral realm where kids may engage their fears without becoming consumed by them. From an early age, Mr. Sendak’s words and pictures taught me that, yes, the world is a scary place, but it’s also a magical, surprising place. It can’t be one without being the other.”

PS – Ghost stories can also be a fun way to teach history. Read about that here on the “Mad about Middle Grade History” blog.

Chris Eboch writes a variety of genres for all ages. Her Haunted series for ages 8-12 follows a brother and sister who travel with their parents’ ghost hunter TV show. They try to help the ghosts, while keeping their activities secret from meddling grownups. In The Ghost on the Stairs, an1880s ghost bride haunts a Colorado hotel, waiting for her missing husband to return. The Riverboat Phantom features a steamboat pilot still trying to prevent a long-ago disaster. In The Knight in the Shadows, a Renaissance French squire protects a sword on display at a New York City museum. During The Ghost Miner’s Treasure, Jon and Tania help a dead man find his lost gold mine – but they’re not the only ones looking for it. Learn more at www.chriseboch.com or her Amazon page, or check out her writing tips at her Write Like a Pro! blog.

“Scary” Books for the Chicken-Hearted by Dawn Lairamore

Chicken-hearted—that would be me. Okay, so I’m a little better as an adult. But as a middle-grader, I scared at the drop of a hat. Ghosts, monsters, things that went bump in the night—I didn’t want to read (or hear) about anything even remotely frightening. Otherwise, I saw strange shadows in the corners of my room at night and had to go to bed with all the lights on. Can anyone say overactive imagination? Yep, that was me.

So, in honor of Halloween this week—and because I know first-hand the trauma of being terrified by scary stories as a kid—I thought I'd take this opportunity to recommend a “scary” book that’s actually fairly light on the scare factor. It’s more suspenseful than anything else, and although it might get your spine tingling here and there, I don’t believe it ever crosses the line into full-blown scary. It’s the kind of story even I could have comfortably read as a kid, so I feel it might be a good option for youngsters who scare easily or perhaps aren’t quite ready for more intense storylines. Also, it’s just a really wonderful book—well-written and atmospheric with a unique and intriguing plot. I highly recommend it for all middle-grade readers, even those who might be a little sensitive to all things spooky.

The Aviary by Kathleen O’Dell tells the story of 12-year-old Clara Dooley, who lives in a crumbling mansion owned by Mrs. Glendoveer, a magician’s widow. It even has an iron aviary in the garden, housing the magician’s old collection of birds. When Clara discovers that the Glendoveer children disappeared from the home in a decades-old kidnapping that was never solved, she sets off to do some investigating of her own. But what does this horrible kidnapping have to do with her? As if this wasn’t mystery enough, the mynah bird in the garden has started to talk, screeching out the name, “Elliot,” whatever that means…

Magic, mystery, and a touch of a ghost story give this book just the right touch of creepiness, but at its heart it’s a story of friendship, loyalty, and family more than anything else. Besides, the human bad guys are far worse than any of the “ghosts.” (Incidentally, I think The Aviary is a great example for middle-grade writers of how to effectively use suspense.)

Does anyone else have recommendations for “scary” books that would be appropriate for middle-graders who don’t like to be scared?

-Dawn Lairamore

photo credit: barb_ar via photopin cc

Guest Post & Giveaway with Claire Legrand

With the beginning of a new school year in the mix, an occasion that many students and teachers find horrifying, I thought it’d be good to have Claire Legrand stop by to discuss horror in middle-grade books. It’s a tough thing to pull off in MG—horror—because you need to observe the line between scary and too scary, and Claire, whose debut THE CAVENDISH HOME FOR BOYS AND GIRLS, is here to offer her take. She is in the midst of a long blog tour, so check out the link at the end of the post to see where she'll be next. First, here’s a bit about Claire.

Claire Legrand is a Texan living in New York City. She used to be a musician until she realized she couldn’t stop thinking about the stories in her head. Now a full-time writer, Claire can often be found typing with purpose on her keyboard or spontaneously embarking upon adventures to lands unknown. The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls is her first novel, due out August 28 from Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. Her second novel, The Year of Shadows, a ghost story for middle grade readers, comes out August 2013. Her third novel, Winterspell, a young adult re-telling of The Nutcracker, comes out Fall 2014.

So, without further adieu, here is Claire to talk about horror in MG.

The Challenges (and Fun Parts!) of Writing MG Horror

At first, I didn’t like calling Cavendish a horror novel. “Horror” sounded so uncouth, so bloody and gory. It brought to mind cheesy slasher movies like Friday the 13th or—heaven help me—the Child’s Play movies (i.e., Those Movies That, Though I Have Not Seen Them, Traumatized Me For Life Simply By Being on a Shelf in Blockbuster Where I Could See Their Covers). When people say “horror,” it can elicit a revolted response from certain readers. Most people love comedies, or dramas, or action-adventure stories. But horror? To me, horror has always been a niche genre of storytelling that only a certain minority of people can stomach and enjoy.

Before selling Cavendish, I’d always called it a “dark fairy tale,” and I still like that classification. Cavendish is the kind of story you read to your children before bed, along with other tales about witches and kidnapped kids, dark fantastical creatures and towns that aren’t quite right.

But I’ve come to realize that, broadly speaking, Cavendish is horror. Pure, straight-up horror. Terrifying, unthinkable things happen, and not everything turns out okay for our heroes in the end. I’ve accepted this genre classification wholeheartedly. Why? Well, first of all, “horror” is a much easier label to explain than “dark fairy tale.” But there’s another reason, too.

Writing horror, quite simply, is fun. Especially writing horror for kids. Why wouldn’t I want to embrace this?

Uncovering the darkest parts within yourself and then writing about them, preferably in a safe apartment with lots of lights and cuddly blankets, is a great way to exorcise fears (although I am still terrified of bugs, even after writing Cavendish). Returning to the mindset of 9- to 12-year-old kid thirsty for scares, a kid ready to believe anything, read anything, be scared by anything, no matter how outrageous (Slappy the ventriloquist dummy from R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books come to mind)? That’s fun, and liberating, like riding a roller coaster for the first time, or closing the bathroom door and saying “Bloody Mary” three times in the dark . . . and surviving. That’s the kind of pure thrill we seldom experience as adults, simply because we’ve experienced it so many times. The rush has diminished.

But as a kid in bed with a flashlight or sitting around a campfire with his friends, reading about things he’s never dared to imagine? Things that have always crept around the edges of his mind like vague shadows he was afraid to focus on for too long? That kid will remember those first horror books, those first deep scares, for the rest of his life. As an adult, he’ll see that book on the shelf, and shiver, and grin, and remember the exact way his heart pounded as he flipped frantically through those last, terrifying pages. I know I remember the first time I read The Dollhouse Murders. The Painted Devil. A Darker Magic. Night of the Living Dummy. They all scared me deep down to my bones. And now, even though I will probably forever fear dolls, dummies, or anything resembling dolls and dummies, I wouldn’t trade those literary experiences for anything.

For all the delicious glee that comes with crafting a child’s future psychological idiosyncrasies, writing horror for children can be extremely challenging, too. How scary is too scary? How dark is too dark? (My grandmother, who responds to all my writing with a kind but bewildered, “Where does all this dark stuff come from, Claire Bear?” would probably say that Cavendish is too scary and dark. But I disagree!)

When writing Cavendish, I only once stopped to think, “Is this too scary? Is this too much?” (And I think you’ll know which element I’m referring to once you read the book.) Aside from that, I wrote exactly the kind of scariness that had haunted me as a young reader, the kind of pure, raw scariness that you find in the darkest of fairy tales. Nothing so unsophisticated as people jumping out from dark corners or monsters with drooling black gums. No, the scariness that hooked me as a child, that still haunts me to this day, was the elemental horror. The horror that someone could take over your mind. Make others forget about you. Make you forget about yourself. Change you, forever, and in such a way that you wouldn’t notice, or even care.

That kind of horror poured out of me when writing Cavendish. I didn’t actually worry if it was too scary for kids because kids are smart. They can handle reading about dark, terrible things because they are so incredibly open, so accepting of the fact that there is evil in the world and so hopeful that it can be beaten. 

What I did worry about at times—and this was after the book was written, once I began revisions—was whether parents would find it too scary. Teachers. Librarians. I think older readers scare more easily than their child counterparts. Maybe it’s that they’ve experienced real horror in the world, and seen how it so often can’t be beaten. Or it’s that they want to protect their children from even a fantastical, literary version of that horror for as long as possible.

Whatever the case, it was a real concern for me in the revisions stage, and it was a concern for some at my publishing house as well. Would the horror in Cavendish be too . . . well . . . horrifying to sell to the people buying these middle grade books, i.e., the gatekeepers?

The two things I focused on to get me through revisions, through these doubts and questions about whether or not I’d gone too far, were the following two mantras: Trust your readers. And trust your story.

The first mantra, trust your readers, I’ve already addressed. Kids are smart, savvy, and resilient, and they’ll be much more receptive to books and reading in general if neither coddles them or tries to hide them from darkness.

The second mantra, trust your story, is all about authorial accountability. If sitting down to write middle grade horror, consider the following: What story am I trying to tell? What tone am I trying to convey? What scary elements are necessary to communicate these things? And then, once those questions are answered, write exactly that. As with all the best horror stories, whether book or film, it’s not about how many scares you can fit into one story. It’s about what kind of scares, and how they’re fit into the story, and how they serve the story. Gratuitous violence, gotcha! moments, and gore may provide superficial shock value. But they don’t enhance a story’s core; and, even more importantly for authors of children’s literature, they could make booksellers, parents, and other gatekeepers balk.

Tell the story you need to tell, and use horror elements that are appropriate for that story. Just as, if I were writing a young adult novel, I wouldn’t insert gratuitous sex scenes or cursing just to be “edgy,” so would I refrain from inserting gratuitous horror elements in any story, but especially a middle grade story, just to get cheap scares.

After all, the best horror stories are those that make us work for the scares, those that take their time setting up a world and characters that feel real and relatable. That way, when the true horror begins, the story doesn’t need to rely on camera tricks or their literary equivalent to scare its readers. The story only needs to play out as it was meant to, a tale of normal people in a normal world that’s going slowly, irrevocably bad, and the heroine fighting to save it—even if her victory comes a little bit messily.

Make sure to check out the rest of the Cavendish Blog Tour here!

And go say hi to Claire at her blog | twitter | facebook | tumblr | goodreads

To win a hardcover copy of The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls from Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers, fill out the form below! Contest is U.S./Canada only. Contest ends September 22nd.
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