 When I recently read both Jacqueline West’s excellent YA novel Last Things and Frances Hardinge’s dark fantasy Deeplight I sighed with relief as both featured something which is seemingly becoming an endangered species in teen horror and dark fiction… male leading characters. Ginger Nuts of Horror probably reviews more YA dark fiction novels than anywhere else on the internet and when we look back at the books featured the bias towards lead female characters in the last couple of years is startling. This article, in a very general manner, bounces around some observations based upon over 200 books we have featured since 2015. Is the main character? FEMALE MALE BOTH/MIX Books reviewed 2015/16 35 38 37 Books reviewed 2017/18/19 72 15 18 When Ginger Nuts seriously started covering YA novels back in 2015, many of our early posts included the equivalent of ‘best of’ lists based upon books I read over many previous years, as time progressed this has evolved to predominately feature new fiction. The books reviewed in 2017 and beyond are almost exclusively new titles and are a very good reflection of what is readily available on the market. I work as a School Librarian and actively select/seek out books which are aimed at both boys and girls and have recently been struggling to resource books with leading male characters. Indeed, recently a respected and well-informed American horror blogger contacted me and asked for good suggestions which featured leading YA male protagonists. I struggled to come up with a list and that initial enquiry partly inspired this article. So, where have all the boys gone? There is no single answer, but lots of contributing factors, many of which are connected to YA in general, not singularly horror. Here’s some food for thought, feel free to disagree…. Are there any ‘best-selling’ YA horror authors in the UK? Sadly, YA horror is not a huge market and at the moment, perhaps the UK in particular, is struggling for a horror poster boy (or girl) author. Who are the biggest names in the market? The answer is disappointing: there are none. Many of the top dogs of yesteryear have either dimmed in popularity or moved onto other things. Some examples; Darren Shan, who has sold millions of books, now writes adult titles as Darren Dash, William Hussey hasn’t written a YA novel since 2015, Cliff McNish hasn’t written a YA horror novel since 2011 and Jon Mayhew hasn’t written a horror novel since 2011. Others dark fiction writers I enjoy include who seem to have disappeared include Tom Becker, Charlie Higson, Sam Enthoven, Andrew Hammond, Dean Vincent Carter, Rick Yancey and FE Higgins. Note, however, I still heartily recommend all these authors. Other authors have obviously found it more profitable to move onto other areas of fiction. To drive home this point I recently bumped into Sarah Naughton who was once nominated for the Children’s Costa Book Award for a horror novel but hasn’t written a YA book since The Blood List in 2014. Why is that? Sarah also writes as Sarah J Naughton and since 2017 has written four successful adult mainstream thrillers. We all have to pay the bills and if you write YA horror don’t give up the day job. However, a few do continue to proudly fly the horror flag. Marcus Sedgwick expertly flits between genres and still writes horror, Jonathan Stroud entertained with his Lockwood and Co series and Chris Priestley is always reliable for slightly younger readers and once in a while Neil Gaiman writes a novel, such as The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which YA audiences can tap into. All three also feature male characters. Is Red Eye the only truly genuine YA horror brand in the UK? We think so. Those of us who are old enough feel nostalgic when articles appear about Point Horror and Goosebumps, these books were equally popular with both male and female readers and the main protagonists were also split between the sexes. Their golden age was the 1990s, but they have seen smaller revivals here and there. These books were written to follow a certain formula and the marketing appealed equally to both sexes. Interestingly, in 2019 there is only one genuine equivalent to Point Horror and that is the popular series Red Eye which is the first point of reference for school librarians recommending horror to their kids. It is worth noting that their covers are very gender neutral and from the blurbs it is often difficult to tell whether the main characters are male or female and often contain both. This ‘brand’ has a wide range of authors writing for it, in the same way Point Horror did and when a kid asks me; “are there any new Red Eye book?” I’m always delighted! Funnily enough the most successful of the ten titles published thus far is Frozen Charlotte which you could argue is the most ‘girl-friendly’ and was picked up in a major marketing WH Smith campaign by Youtube personality Zoella. At the moment they seen to be releasing two books a year and have a wide range of talented authors writing for them. They should consider upping their publishing output. It is worth noting that Badger Learning, who specialise in special needs such as Dyslexia, also regularly publish excellent horror aimed at older kids with lower reading ages. These are usually series which have around six books and include Tales of Horror, Horror Hotel, Paper Cuts and Dark Reads, many have the content for fourteen-year-old teens, but the reading age of much younger kids. Many of the stories also feature boys and are excellent for diversity. Few boys were interested in the bestselling subgenre Paranormal Romance When Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight arrived in 2005 it kicked-off the sub-genre of paranormal romance, which was to dominate the horror teen charts for the next decade. Few boys bothered with Twilight and the YA publishing world quickly realised there was a massive industry here and the shelves heaved with everything from PC Cast’s never-ending House of Night series to Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires. Before long paranormal romance expanded beyond vampires into angels (fallen or otherwise), werewolves, banshees and fairies. Once again, few boys ever read the works of the most popular authors which included Lauren Kate, Melissa Marr and Becca Fitzpatrick and the ‘non-romantic’ side of horror was underrepresented during the long reign of popularity these books had and has struggled to recover in the years since. Does the publishing industry prefer girl empowering narratives? If it nets them more sales then definitely. There is also plenty of statistical evidence to show girls spend more of their disposable income on books than boys. Twenty years ago, it was normal to presume books with blue covers were for boys and those which were pink were for girls. This is no longer the case, and quite right too, but you cannot get away from the fact that the likes of Paranormal Romance were predominately aimed at a female audience. Since then, the literary and publishing industry has continued to favour girl empowerment narratives. In the endless cycle of publishing perhaps more fiction aimed at girls has ultimately created more writers writing fiction aimed at girls. Budding authors will find it easier to sell their manuscripts if they have strong female narratives as they are more likely to get publishers biting. Are boys more likely to jump to the ‘real stuff’ and skip YA horror altogether? Has the publishing market pinpointed the fact that boys are more likely to read fiction that isn't categorised as YA or are more likely to skip straight to the ‘real’ stuff, particularly in horror? Possibly, but girls are just as likely to be mature readers. Recently there has been some discussion in the media that YA is too concerned with 'teen interests' and this is less likely to appeal to male adolescent readers, everything from refugees to people trafficking. I frequently chat with plenty of young teenagers (boys and girls) skipping straight onto the likes of Stephen King who find the idea of reading ‘watered down’ YA horror a waste of time when they can tap into the real thing and who can blame when? The advertisement campaign of the film IT Part 2 is bound to suck a proportion of the film watchers to the original King masterpiece. Also, the reality is many school librarians will not lend kids 11 and 12 years old (Years 7-8 in England) the likes of Stephen King for fear that parents may complain. This is the reality of the nanny-state we now live in. Whether you read IT or The Fog is as a 12-year-old twenty years ago is not the point most librarians would not give it to a kid in 2019 and so we really do need a wider selection of YA horror to attract these younger readers, both boys and girls. Boys seriously dug Katniss Everdeen Whilst lots of kids were sucked into both the Twilight books and films a new heroine was soon to appear on the horizon, Katniss Everdeen. The Hunger Games trilogy was equally popular with boys as it was with girls and heralded in a new wave of dystopian YA fiction, much of which tackled contemporary political, social and gender issues in dark, almost horror, settings. The Hunger Games may have been the leader of the pack, but there were other terrific examples which included male protagonists, such as The Maze Runner. So, if paranormal romance was attempting to tap into the teenage girl audience, the dystopian fad was equally popular with boys. It has also been said that politically motivated series, which featured powerful messages about race and equality, such as Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series has contributed to the politically motivated age-group which are now in their twenties but read these books as teenagers. The popularity of dystopian fiction may have peaked, but the likes of Teri Terri, Neal Shusterman and Virginia Bergin remain very popular with both boys and girls. Check out Shusterman’s outstanding Arc of the Scythe dystopian series with a superb split boy/girl narrative. This more realistic horror pushed the horror of demons and monsters into the background and in a sense horror, in a wider sense, got more serious taking in politics and the environment. The internet has dimmed the power of horror non-fiction Halloween sees the rerelease of the 1977 cult classic World of the Unknown: Ghosts a non-fiction pictorial book published by Usborne which I vividly remember reading as a kid. In the pre-internet days kids lapped these types of books, could it be for pre-teenagers or those slightly older these types of books are now just seen as a little bit old hat when there is much freakier stuff available on Youtube? As a teen I recall being amazed seeing pictures of poltergeists or spontaneous human combustion in books like this, but again these days the internet has replaced these images for sheer shock value. It is often said that boys read more non-fiction than girls, but when it comes to horror both boys and girls borrowing books on vampires, werewolves or aliens is a fraction of what it once was. It will be interesting to see whether there will be any interest in Ghosts, I have a feeling the children of today will view it as a time-capsule from another era, which it undoubtedly is. Do girls really read more widely than boys? There has long since been an assumption that girls read more widely than boys and there is statistical evidence to back it up. There is a certain amount of truth in this: as a rule boys did not read or borrow from my library paranormal romance and moving away from horror boys simply do not read books with a pink cover or, for example, the mainstream novels of the likes of Jacqueline Wilson or Cathy Cassidy (this type of fiction was once called ‘pink lit’). However, girls are not put off by gory covers and happily borrow adventure thrillers by the likes of Anthony Horowitz or Robert Muchamore, which you think might be more aimed at boys. Ultimately girls do seem to be more open to experimentation when it comes to books and are more likely to participate in reading challenges which might include books which seem to be geared towards a particular sex. One of my top recommendations of the last couple of years is Amy Lukavics who has written four outstanding YA novels on the bounce, the first two of which were picked up by UK publishers and even though girls are the main characters in all the books, the covers are fairly neutral. Have I managed to get many boys to read these books? Not a chance and that’s a real shame. I was recently at a school librarian meeting about a book award and we discussed Justina Ireland’s stunning American Civil War novel Dread Nation and a couple of the librarians present who work in boys’ schools were very disappointed to see a girl predominately displayed on the cover. The main character is a teenage girl, but anyone would love it, but the reality is most boys will not see beyond the cover. The publisher should have known better, the book is about zombies, and there was scope to do something much more imaginative with the cover. The new wave of female horror authors is setting the bar very high The current wave of successful female horror writers and some of the very best YA dark fiction titles have been written by women an although they occasionally write with a male voice, most stick to their own gender. Are many of these books aimed at the female audience? Yes and no. I just mentioned one of my all-time favourites, Amy Lukavics; her leading characters are always girls and gender usually plays a key role in her stories. I interviewed Amy a while ago and danced around this subject: “GNoH: There are a distinct lack of men/boys/boyfriends in all three of your novels, why do you write such female driven fiction? This is not a criticism! Only an observation… Amy: It's not necessarily something I've done on purpose, but at the same time I've always written the books that I would want to read myself. And it just so happens that most of my favourite stories, horror or not, are centred around women. I especially love a good female villain!” I could talk forever about the range of superb female writers, many of whom are American. The deep pool of talent include: Courtney Alameda, Rin Chupeco, Kami Garcia, Danielle Vega, Maggie Stiefvater, Holly Black, Adriana Mather, Lauren Myracle, Cat Winters, Madeleine Roux, Jeyn Roberts, Kimberley Derting, Dawn Kurtagich, Victoria Dalpe, Amanda Hocking and many more. Interestingly there are also many more men writing with female voices, but very few women writing with a male perspective, Theresa Braun’s excellent Fountain Dead is one of the few I have come across recently. Male writing as female characters as common as mud, from Scott Sigler’s Alive Trilogy to Matt Whyman’s cannibal romp The Savages and Dave Jeffrey’s splendid Beatrice Beecham series. On the other hand, I have noticed that more experienced authors, tend to have both boys and girls as voices, especially in series, Jonanthan Maberry being a good example. This obviously spreads the net wider and is more likely to be what the publisher is after. Do boys spend more time playing computer games than girls? Do boys spend more time playing computer games than girls? Almost certainly. Are computer games more addictive than in previous decades? Younger versions of myself would say no. The ten-year-old version of me found Pacman very addictive and the twenty-year-old version of myself found Resident Evil equally intensive. Potential male teen readers have always been lost to the home computer since the days of the Atari 2600 and then the Spectrum 48. Of course, there are female computer gamers and girls who play off-shoots like Dungeons and Dragons, but this is primarily a male market and is geared at teenage boys. Perhaps publishers have clicked that girls are their primary YA fiction consumer as they have realised male readers have moved onto other things including comics and graphic novels or interconnected fiction like Warhammer. Having said that, my library deleted a significant collection of Warhammer novels a few years ago as nobody borrowed them at all. Ultimately their niche has moved away from the traditional book and at a certain age the videogame dominates and the YA book market, not just horror, has shrunk accordingly. The lack of American YA horror being picked up by UK publishers is worrying At the moment very few American YA horror novels are being picked up by UK publishers and being distributed with a British ISBN. This means they are unlikely to be available in UK bookshops and are not available through most traditional book suppliers which public and school libraries might use. A significant number of the new books we review on Ginger Nuts are not readily available in the UK unless you use Amazon, an option which will be unavailable to many schools and public libraries. It is a shame to see YA horror so under-represented in our last remaining bookshops, Waterstones and WH Smith, which concentrate on the tony selection of mainstream titles and the bigger selling 9-12 age group. The disappearance on the garish/trashy horror YA novel The massive success of Darren Shan in the early noughties led to a whole host of trashy, but very fun, horror cycles, which might not have been as big as Shan, but were still popular and often featured boys as leading characters. I hail David Gatward for his Dead Trilogy and the standalone Doom Rider, who is yet another author to abandon YA horror. I also lament the disappearance of the wonderful EE Richardson who set the horror world alight between 2005-07 with three wonderful horror novels, all of which had male lead characters; The Devil’s Footsteps, The Summoning, and The Intruders, although she has written other novels none of them touch these first three offerings. Around that period, it was fairly normal to see trashy kid versions of Guy N Smith novels filling the shelves, but this is no longer the case and they seem to have been a major casualty in the cutbacks in publishing. It would nice to see a return of old-fashioned gore, guts and the gates of hell being ripped open for a new generation of young teens. If you’re nostalgic for this kind of stuff here’s a few suggestions from recent yesteryear: Stephen Cole’s The Wereling Trilogy, Steve Feasey’s The Changeling Series, Seb Rook’s Vampire Plague Series, Nick Gifford’s Flesh and Blood, Justin Somper’s Vampirates Series, and Simon Holt’s The Devouring Trilogy. Conclusions It would be terrific to see more boys represented in new and upcoming YA horror releases. However, our next Ginger Nuts YA round-up features more of the same, of the ten books reviewed nine include girls as the main character and one book has both male and female. Dark fiction titles aimed at the 9-12 age group, as they are often bracketed in the bookshops, usually have a more equal spread of boys and girls and it is disappointing that the teenage boy is sorely unrepresented in the older section. Boys get identification from ‘boy stuff’ and heroes fighting monsters which they can relate to and for many boy’s novels starring thoughtful teenage girls are just not what they want to read. The borrowing trends in my school certainly back this up. Which YA horror novel am I reading at the moment? Only Ashes Remain by Rebecca Schaeffer, starring, you guessed it, another feisty teenage girl. If you’re a reader of YA do let us know if there are any books featuring male characters we might have overlooked published in the last couple of years. Tony Jones     Jacqueline West is the author of the YA horror/dark fantasy novel Last Things, as well as the New York Times-bestselling middle grade series The Books of Elsewhere and the award-winning middle grade fantasy The Collectors. Her first full-length poetry collection, Candle and Pins: Poems on Superstitions, was published in 2018 and was selected for the preliminary ballot of the Bram Stoker Awards. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in journals including Mythic Delirium, The Pedestal Magazine, ChiZine, Mirror Dance, and Liminality. She lives in Minnesota with her family. Visit her online at www.jacquelinewest.com. Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I write poetry and fiction of the dark and twisty variety. My books for young readers, including The Books of Elsewhere, The Collectors, and Last Things, have been published in the US and in twelve other countries to date, and I also write poetry and short fiction for adults. To get the ball rolling and get everyone relaxed, here is a hopefully lighthearted question to break the ice, which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life and have them complain at you about they way you treated them in your work. Probably Flynn from Last Things. He gets a pretty crummy deal, I’ll admit. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? Poetry has been hugely important. Growing up, I devoured everything from Shakespeare to Poe to Plath. Fantasy is another major pillar: Bradbury, Gaiman, Kelly Link, Tolkien. And Last Things could not have been written without the influence of music—specifically metal. Several bands were so integral to the book, they all get thanked in the acknowledgements. The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations. What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions? Some writers I admire really dislike the “horror” label – they prefer something like “dark fiction” and its broader connotations. Personally, I don’t mind seeing the label applied to some of my work, although in a lot of people’s minds “horror” just means blood and entrails and masks made of human skin. I really like Stephen King’s breakdown of the term in Danse Macabre. He writes that the horror genre exists on three different levels: Terror is the top level, the one where subtlety counts, where the source of the fear often goes unseen and readers’ imaginations do all the powerful work, where classics like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and The Haunting of Hill House belong. The level below that is straight-up horror, where the violence is much more exposed, and the fear tends toward the physical instead of the psychological, and where King places some of his own novels, like ’Salem’s Lot. The bottom level is “the gag reflex of revulsion,” as he puts it. And that bottom level seems to be what a lot of people think of when they hear the term “horror”. When I write, I’m usually aiming for that highest “terror” level, but sometimes I’ll dip (or dive) below it, if a scene or a line needs it. I’m never trying just to disgust a reader. Then again, everybody’s disgust threshold is different. A line from The Books of Elsewhere that I thought of as a dark little joke has bothered at least a few young readers so much that they quit at chapter one. So maybe we need to try out other terms, like “dark fiction” or “terror” – although I’m not sure I see those catching on. The better course is probably to keep producing, supporting, and spreading all the kinds of horror fiction that don’t fit into the bottom level, or even the middle level, while proudly claiming them as “horror” too; books like Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It, Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories, films like Get Out. There’s so much good stuff out there. A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate. Considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years? The state of the real world is so terrifying right now, I wonder if horror fiction will move in a more escapist, fantastical direction, maybe with monsters and alternate worlds. Or it might do the opposite and become small-scale and eerily realistic, with evils like racism, sexism, and the dangers of new technology at its core. We’ll see. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? Fear is fascinating. It’s so human to recognize what scares us, and then to seek it out, to test ourselves and our feelings. Horror fiction gives us a safe place to do that. What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? Diversity. The publishing world is slowly catching up with the real world, but I’d still love to see a wider variety of voices: more women, more LGBTQ+ writers, people of different backgrounds and experiences. In the past authors were able to write about almost anything with a far lesser degree of the fear of backlash, but this has all changed in recent years. These days authors must be more aware of representation and the depiction of things such as race and gender in their works. How aware are you of these things and what steps have you taken to ensure that your writing can’t be viewed as being offensive to a minority group? I try not to worry about backlash, and I don’t seek out reviews of my work – nothing I write is going to please everyone, and once something is published, there’s nothing I can do to change it anyway – but prepublication, I have a team of readers who give me feedback: my family, my critique group, my agent, and of course my editors/publication team. And when I write about a character whose life experiences are vastly different from mine, I do some serious research first. For example, the main character of one of my middle grade fantasies is hard of hearing, and I spent many, many hours interviewing kids who are hard of hearing or deaf, observing at schools, reading memoirs and textbooks, talking to DHH teachers, and I also had expert readers go through the manuscript, noting anything I had missed. Even with all that research, I’m sure I didn’t do a perfect job. I know that there are writers and critics who think writers shouldn’t even try to use major characters whose backgrounds are different from their own…but I don’t want to live or write in a world that’s this limited. Writing and reading are empathetic acts. They let us grow beyond ourselves. Does horror fiction perpetuate its own ghettoization? I suppose it does…but a lot of this is due to the packaging, which is often totally out of the writer’s hands. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of? I already mentioned Carmen Maria Machado; I’m buying anything she comes up with next. And the YA world is all on fire about Rory Power’s debut novel Wilder Girls, which was just published in the US. What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author? Oh god. Alvin Schwartz’s original Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark collections, with Stephen Gammell’s illustrations. In grade school, my friends and I would pore over these books during slumber parties, scaring ourselves witless. Gammell’s pencil drawings are seared into my mind. Around the same time, I found the books Haunted Wisconsin and Haunted Heartland in my grade school library – they were written by a local author, full of carefully researched stories of the most famous haunted homes (and other locations) in the region – and I became obsessed. These books may be the reason that eerie houses feature so strongly in my fiction. As a young reader, I was also drawn to the intersection of horror and humor. Books like the Bunnicula series (and to a lesser extent, Goosebumps and Tales from the Crypt), shows like The Addams Family, and some of Tim Burton’s earlier movies all had a big impact on my tastes. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative, that have stayed with you? As I said, I tend not to seek out reviews—but I’ll admit that the blurbs V.E. Schwab and Claire Legrand wrote for Last Things had me over the moon. (Victoria Schwab wrote: “West has an eerie way with words, an uncanny ability to conjure the perfect image. Last Things is at once poetic and urgent, evocative and authentic, everything I love in a book,” and Claire Legrand called it “the kind of taut, atmospheric thriller that gets your heart racing and sets your imagination on fire. Sensational.”) When I’m losing faith, I can reread those words and feel a bit stronger. What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? Everything. Every story, every poem, every book is different. Sometimes the hard part is the drafting, sometimes it’s the revising, sometimes it’s the publication. There are stumbling blocks and bruises waiting everywhere. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? I don’t think I’ll ever write about abuse of small children or animals, at least not in a way that gives the spotlight to the abuse itself. How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning? Finding the right character and place names is extremely important. I use both sound and meaning to make name choices (there are lots of character hints in the meanings of the names I chose in Last Things), and I try to give a lot of thought to the family and culture a character comes from (Rutherford Dewey in The Books of Elsewhere is the son of two physicists, so I decided that he was named after Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics; Anders Thorson in Last Things is from a predominantly Scandinavian town in northern Minnesota, etc.). I also have synesthesia, so each letter of the alphabet has a specific color in my mind. I tend to use darker-colored letters for the initials of dangerous or mysterious characters, and lighter-hued letters for the more heroic characters. (Of course, no one will notice this practice but me.) Writing is not a static process. How have you developed as a writer over the years? Writing has gone from being the thing I did entirely in secret—I used to hide my drafts in my dresser drawers, under layers of clothes—to being the thing I do for a living. I guess admitting that I was a writer was the first step. Over the past nine years of full-time writing, I’ve figured out a process that tends to work for me. I draft longhand, with pen and paper; I work on multiple projects at once so that I can always make progress on something; I revise extensively (often before I let anyone else get even a glimpse at what I’m doing); I’ve found people who I trust to give me useful, honest feedback. And I’ve grown a much, much thicker skin. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? Well, he didn’t give this advice to me in particular, but Neil Gaiman once said: “Write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” Whenever I’m crushed by the scope and challenge of this work, that’s what I tell myself. Just write the next thing. To many writers, the characters they write become like children. Who is your favorite child, and who is your least favorite to write for and why? I never think of my characters as my children (I do far too many awful things to them for that), but I truly love both Anders and Thea, the dual protagonists/narrators of Last Things. Getting to know them, and speaking with their voices, was one of the greatest pleasures of writing that book. For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why? Last Things is my personal favorite of the books I’ve written so far. I’d say anyone who reads Last Things, my poetry collection Candle and Pins, and The Shadows, volume one of my Books of Elsewhere series, should have a very good idea of who I am and what I do. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? I think this passage from Chapter One of Last Things gives some decent hints about the book as a whole: I take the path straight through the woods. The trees lean back as I pass. They whisper and hiss. They know what I am. They know what I know. My own house isn’t far away, on a mossy dead-end road deep in the oaks and pines. I’ll pass Anders’s house first. Take one more look. Make sure he’s inside. Watch his windows. Wait until he shuts off the lights. Maybe. Maybe I’ll wait even longer than that. Maybe I’ll watch all night. Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? Last Things, my most recent book, was published in May 2019 in the US, and it’s a modern-day, metal, Minnesotan reimagining of the legend of the musician who may have sold his soul to the devil. I’m currently at work on another YA novel—this one is titled Black Point--set in a very small, very insular midwestern town with a dark secret history. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? The young, beautiful, personality-free girl victim whose only purpose is to be tortured and/or die gruesomely. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? “Hey, I’m part of an insanely talented up-and-coming metal band—Howard Jones, Trent Reznor, Maynard James Keenan, and the guys from In Flames are collaborating with us on our debut album—and we’d like to write, record, and perform songs based on the lyrics in Last Things. Would that be all right?” Nobody ever asks me that. LAST THINGS BY JACQUELINE WEST New York Times-bestselling author Jacqueline West captivates readers with a dark, hypnotic story about the cost of talent--and the evil that lurks just out of sight. Fans of Holly Black and Victoria Schwab will be mesmerized by this gorgeous, magnetic novel. High school senior Anders Thorson is unusually gifted. His band, Last Things, is legendary in their northern Minnesota hometown. With guitar skills that would amaze even if he weren't only eighteen, Anders is the focus of head-turning admiration. And Thea Malcom, a newcomer to the insular town, is one of his admirers. Thea seems to turn up everywhere Anders goes: gigs at the local coffeehouse, guitar lessons, even in the woods near Anders's home. When strange things start happening to Anders, blame immediately falls on Thea. But is she trying to hurt him? Or save him? Can he trust a girl who doesn't seem to know the difference between dreams and reality? And how much are they both willing to sacrifice to get what they want? Told from Anders's and Thea's dual points of view, this exquisitely crafted novel is full of unexpected twists and is for fans of Holly Black's The Darkest Part of the Forest and Melissa Albert's The Hazel Wood. "Everything I love in a book."--Victoria Schwab, author of #1 New York Times bestseller This Savage Song "The kind of taut, atmospheric thriller that gets your heart racing and sets your imagination on fire. Sensational."--Claire Legrand, New York Times-bestselling author of Furyborn CLICK HERE to CHECK OUT OUR REVIEW OF LAST THINGS  Outstanding blend of supernatural, teen angst and hard rock, HELL YEAH!!!! Young Adult (YA) novels with a musical theme are notoriously tricky to get right and when you throw in heavy metal it becomes even more difficult to avoid the dreaded devil-horn clichés. Amazingly, Jacqueline West superb Last Things avoids these pitfalls in a gripping tale of a tortured teenage musician who believes his success might be because of a strange conversation he can’t get out of his head. I’m a long-term heavy metal fan and I felt this novel was super convincing in the way it portrayed the band performing on stage and the overall small-town music vibe scene was pitched perfectly. The cover is slightly juvenile and younger readers may well find it rather slow, but teenagers who enjoy music, a strong character driven plot and an unexpected reveal are sure to love it. I certainly did. It had me wondering what the band actually sounded like! Author Jacqueline West should take that as a major compliment. The story is told via two uniquely different first-person narratives in alternating chapters; ‘Thea’ and ‘Anders’, with all the action taking place in the small Minnesota town of Greenwood. Over the last year a heavy-metal band called ‘Last Things’ have had a very successful Friday night residency at the local coffee shop, ‘The Crow’s Nest’, such is the band’s reputation rockers have been travelling from over 200 miles to see the trio play, including music scouts and agents. The band are beautifully portrayed as three young men, with dreams of escaping their small town, until the cracks begin to show after Anders makes a few rash big decisions on his own. In the early part of the novel, such is their popularity, the coffee shop owner asks the band whether they want to play every Saturday night, as well as their usual Friday. They are big news and it is easy for the reader to get carried along by their success. ‘Last Things’, the band, is a three piece with Anders the tortured genius the story focusses upon, with him singing and playing lead guitar. The eighteen-year-old is ably backed up by Patrick on drums and Jezz on bass. Although they are an incredibly tight unit, it is Anders who is the real star, even if he does not want to be, and this is where the friction with the bandmates begins. The rest of the time Anders is anonymous and his high school persona is completely different from the charismatic frontman which captivates the live crowd week in and week out and even has the cutest girl in school, Frankie Lynde, chasing him down. The music scenes with Anders truly sizzle, equally his obsession with improving his guitar style and the comedown when the gig is over is completely convincing when he is alone brooding in his bedroom. Angsty teen readers are going to lap this stuff up! Where’s the supernatural angle you might ask? Anders believes, even if he practices for hours every day, he plays better than he should. He believes something has happened to make him this good and feels that deep down he is a cheat and does not deserve this success. This was a very clever part of the story and it remains cleverly shrouded for the majority of the novel. I’m not sure how familiar today’s YA audience are with the famous stories from the past, of selling your soul for success, but this is a very clever riff and original spin on that age-old story. Or is it? That’s all part of the fun. Anders is an exceptionally well-rounded character who has a complex and believable relationship with his parents; his father resents the fact that the coffeeshop do not pay the band for their gigs, but this is more to do with Anders strangeness rather than the coffeeshop being stingy. Throw in the family’s lack of finances and Anders guilt over his pricy guitar lessons, you will wonder why the boy seems intent on self-sabotage even when new songs come to him quicker than he can write them down, or the rest of the band can learn to play. Even he cannot understand where the songs come from and spends more time with his guitar (which he calls ‘Yvonne’) rather than the gorgeous Frankie. Yup, this boy has problems! The narrative contrast with Thea, also known as ‘Stalker Girl’ is striking. She loves Ander’s music and has a weird obsession with him, almost like she is watching over or protecting him. This took the book in a very cool direction, as the reader is never quite sure whether she is off-her-head or if there is something stranger going on, which she implies with comments like; “I watch the woods. They’re always closer than you think” and her obsession with the encroaching forest. This girl even lurks in the forest when Anders is home and has her own complicated family background. Last Things takes its time and I thought the pacing was great and the supernatural angle was revealed deliciously slowly bringing Anders and Thea together. There was much to enjoy in this excellent YA novel and I enjoyed the endnote in which the author implied how she felt her band actually sounded like. The blend of atmosphere, the music vibe, the subtle supernatural approach and a host of engaging characters made this one of the best YA supernatural thrillers I have read in a while. Make sure you’re listening to Rage Against The Machine if you’re checking out this book!  LAST THINGS BY JACQUELINE WEST New York Times-bestselling author Jacqueline West captivates readers with a dark, hypnotic story about the cost of talent--and the evil that lurks just out of sight. Fans of Holly Black and Victoria Schwab will be mesmerized by this gorgeous, magnetic novel. High school senior Anders Thorson is unusually gifted. His band, Last Things, is legendary in their northern Minnesota hometown. With guitar skills that would amaze even if he weren't only eighteen, Anders is the focus of head-turning admiration. And Thea Malcom, a newcomer to the insular town, is one of his admirers. Thea seems to turn up everywhere Anders goes: gigs at the local coffeehouse, guitar lessons, even in the woods near Anders's home. When strange things start happening to Anders, blame immediately falls on Thea. But is she trying to hurt him? Or save him? Can he trust a girl who doesn't seem to know the difference between dreams and reality? And how much are they both willing to sacrifice to get what they want? Told from Anders's and Thea's dual points of view, this exquisitely crafted novel is full of unexpected twists and is for fans of Holly Black's The Darkest Part of the Forest and Melissa Albert's The Hazel Wood. "Everything I love in a book."--Victoria Schwab, author of #1 New York Times bestseller This Savage Song "The kind of taut, atmospheric thriller that gets your heart racing and sets your imagination on fire. Sensational."--Claire Legrand, New York Times-bestselling author of Furyborn  |
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