(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)
Happy Halloween, and thank you for reading all the “What Scares You?” guest blogs these past two weeks! Now it’s time for the big giveaway—made up of books and ARCs donated by my publisher Penguin Teen and by some of the guest authors. I’m giving away FOUR PRIZE PACKS.
Here is what you could win:
Prize Pack #1—donated by Penguin Teen: The Replacement and The Space Between by Brenna Yovanoff, Virals and Seizure by Kathy Reichs, Born Wicked (ARC) by Jessica Spotswood, and Imaginary Girls by, um, me (signed!)
Prize Pack #2—donated by Penguin Teen: Nightshade and Wolfsbane by Andrea Creamer, Ripper (ARC) by Stefan Petrucha, The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson, Harbinger (ARC) by Sara Wilson Etienne, and Imaginary Girls by, yep, me (signed!)
Prize Pack #3—donated by guest authors: Other and Bloodborn by Karen Kincy (both signed!), family by Micol Ostow (signed!), Gentlemen by Michael Northrop (signed!), The Only Ones by Aaron Starmer (signed!), The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell (signed!), and Goosebumps: Night of the Living Dummy by R.L. Stine
Prize Pack #4—donated by guest authors: Imaginary Girls by me! (signed!), The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Julet Immortal by Stacey Jay (signed!), Petty Magic by Camille DeAngelis (signed!), The Revenant by Sonia Gensler, Misfit by Jon Skovron (signed!), and Frost by Marianna Baer (signed!).
Here are the rules:
- You must use the form to enter. Comments on this post won’t count as giveaway entries.
- You must have a US address where we can send your prize pack. Due to shipping costs, I’m sorry to say that this giveaway is not international.
- You can gain extra entries in the giveaway by commenting on the guest blogs. Every guest blog you’ve commented on will give you an extra chance to win.
Enter here:
(If you have trouble seeing the entry form embedded in this post, here is a direct link to it.)
I will close this giveaway to entries on Monday, November 7 at 5pm EST.
The FOUR WINNERS will be chosen by random draw (or by some newfangled randomizing code-script thingie I will force E to make for me).
My thanks go to all the wonderful guest bloggers who contributed to this “What Scares You?” blog series, to Penguin Teen for donating prizes for the giveaway, to Robert Roxby for generously designing and illustrating the “What Scares You?” images, and to everyone who read these posts, tweeted about them, and commented.
I will probably never again give away this many books in my lifetime, so go enter!
What’s next for this blog? INSPIRATION in time for NaNoWriMo, including new guest blogs by inspiring authors I know! Check back here tomorrow and you’ll see what I mean!
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I watched Dark Shadows every afternoon and Hammer Horror films whenever I could, thrilling to the gothic, Pinewood Studios sets and anachronistic beehive hairdos. Dario Argento’s Suspiria gave me gorgeous Technicolor nightmares and a healthy fear of stained-glass ceilings. I read horror comics that I hid under my bed and, when I was older, I gobbled up stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. Salem’s Lot is the book I have reread above all others.
The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel, Satan’s School for Girls—this is my terror turf, the sort of thing that makes me want to put on my Bruce Campbell outfit, fire up the chainsaw, and say, “Groovy.” When I was twelve, I went to see The Omen with a friend, and she and I stayed up half the night hiding in her closet, surrounded by anything that looked vaguely religious—a Bible, Popsicle sticks which could be made into a cross in a snap (It is a well-known fact that the Dark Lord does not like frozen ice treats), “holy” water in a Snoopy glass that we had blessed ourselves. A collection of scarves. (Even at twelve, I understood the importance of accessorizing.) We were terrified. We were also thrilled. It never dawned on us that Old Scratch probably had better places to visit than a closet in Denton, Texas. I mean, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were just thirty miles away.
So when October rolls around and the sky darkens, when the wind howls like the last cry of a doomed man and children in Halloween costumes run past laughing those little-kid laughs that sometimes make you wonder if said children were made in a test tube by an escaped Nazi bent on overthrowing the world order, you’ll find me nestled on my couch watching Rosemary’s Baby, and hoping against hope that she’ll win the ultimate fight. But I’ll have my Popsicle sticks with me. Because, you know, I’m not taking any chances.
Libba Bray is hard at work on The Diviners, the first book in a four-book series that is full of the creepy. She’s listening to “Tubular Bells” while she writes.
I carried the book to my room and began reading. Sybil wasn’t a novel, I read, it was a psychological case study. A woman—in the book she’s known as Sybil Dorsett, to protect her privacy—has a whole host of people living inside her, many of them still children. They have names and separate personalities. They look different. They are different. She’s one body for sixteen different people.
The house in question is a haunted mansion where a paranormal investigator goes to live with two guests who’ve agreed to stay there with him to see if they can witness any strange occurrences. One of those guests is Eleanor, who begins to witness some frightening sights inside that house—and I don’t know if we can believe what Eleanor tells us she sees. We’re meant to wonder. To question what’s real and what’s not, all of which plays into our fears. Well, certainly my fears.
I want to thank everyone for being involved in this What Scares You? blog series—the authors who wrote guest blogs for me, the authors who donated their own books to give away, Penguin Teen for generously donating so many books for the giveaway, 
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Micol Ostow is half Puerto Rican, half Jewish, half reader, half writer, and, when under deadline, often half asleep. Micol was working as an editor of young adult fiction when she began to write her own books; since then, she has published over 40 works for readers of all ages. Her novel, Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa
, was named a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, and her graphic novel hybrid, So Punk Rock: And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother
, was chosen as a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Teens.
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Rarely do you get to see such a blatant visual depiction of a person consumed by their own darkness. And that’s what scares me more than anything else. Whether it’s the slow descent into madness in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or the temptation of Anakin Skywalker to the dark side of the Force, there is nothing that haunts me more than our own human capacity for evil. I remember sitting in the movie theater as a very small boy watching Empire Strikes Back. When Vader tried to tempt Luke over to the dark side, I cried out “Luke! Doooon’t doooo it!” and sobbed hysterically into my stoic father’s shoulder. I do get some chills from the forced conversion, when someone gets possessed or gets infected with a zombie plague or whatever. But the real horror for me is when someone makes the conscious choice to let the darkness in.
This fondness for the dark side has carried with me into adulthood. The difference is, now I write my own villains. But the fear remains. And it is very strange to fear the product of your own imagination. I hope you’ll forgive the allusion to my own work, but I often wonder, by writing about the darkness, am I exorcising my demons or encouraging them? How long can I dance along the edge of the abyss before I fall in?
Jon Skovron is the author of Misfit, a YA novel about a half-demon girl in Catholic school, as well as the indie rock novel Struts & Frets. He lives with his two sons outside Washington DC. His sons, ages 6 and 8, chose to dress up as Darth Vader and Darth Maul this year for Halloween. He would like it known that this was entirely their own idea and not something he pressured them into.
One book that thoroughly, deliciously creeped me out was The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. To quote from my original review: “I managed to read 300+ pages straight of this book before someone knocked on my door and I jumped out of bed, adrenaline rushing at the thought of a zombie outside my apartment.” A scene in this book Creeped. Me. Out.
On the subject of zombies, Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry is an awesome action adventure middle-grade. And of course, like all good zombie books, it has scary parts. I don’t want to be too spoilery, but there are scenes involving characters who might be alive, or might be undead, and it’s really hard to tell, so you’re biting your nails while the definitely-alive characters keep their hands on their weapons. Besides all the scariness, Rot & Ruin tackles the emotional aftermath of loved ones becoming zombies, and makes you feel for the undead.
As a nod to our host, Nova, I have to say that Imaginary Girls scared me. I like to read in bed, often at night, and so I merrily started this book. Pretty soon I started getting goosebumps. The dread in this book dawned on me slowly, subtly, like the delicate evocation of horror often found in Japanese films like The Ring—the original one is much creepier than the remake. I didn’t know quite what I should be afraid of, and so the dread built, and built, with all my questions about who was actually dead, and what was actually real.
Karen Kincy (Redmond, Washington) lives among countless trees, some of which—her pet kumquats and oranges—have lovingly invaded her apartment. Unlike her characters, she has never been on the run from the law or bitten by a werewolf, though she has been known to howl at the moon. Karen has a BA in Linguistics and Literature from The Evergreen State College, and is studying toward a Master’s in Computational Linguistics.
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Michelle Hodkin grew up in Florida, went to college in New York, and studied law in Michigan. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found prying strange objects from the jaws of one of her three pets. The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer is her first novel.
What makes these books amazing works of horror isn’t just the monsters Dr. Warthrop studies, which are gruesome and Lovecraftian and utterly terrifying in their own right, but the grains of truth presented along with them. The monsters’ goals are primal—to eat, spread, and survive. They mimic the behavior of germs and parasites. Some real-life parasites are mentioned and described in the book, and they come across as some of the most horrifying monsters of all.
Chelsea Campbell grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where it rains a lot. And then rains some more. She finished her first novel when she was twelve, sent it out, and promptly got rejected. Since then she’s written many more novels, earned a degree in Latin and Ancient Greek, become an obsessive knitter and fiber artist, and started a collection of glass grapes. As a kid, Chelsea read lots of adult books, but now that she’s an adult herself (at least according to her driver’s license), she loves books for kids and teens. Besides writing, studying ancient languages, and collecting useless objects, Chelsea is a pop-culture fangirl at heart and can often be found rewatching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, leveling up in World of Warcraft, or spending way too much time on Twitter and Facebook.
For an even better example of what I’m writing about, read the master: Stephen King. In his first novel, Carrie, he wraps up all the plotlines nicely at the end. Carrie, a telekinetic, has killed nearly 500 people before succumbing to a knife wound. At that point, a lesser writer might crack open a beer and call it a day. Instead, King gives us a chilling postscript that hints at another telekinetic waiting in the wings—a postscript that leaves it entirely to his readers’ imaginations as to what new horror will play out when she comes into her full powers. King’s mastery isn’t in what he writes, but in what he leaves to our imaginations.
Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really hoping this writing thing works out.
