  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  |
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