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Last One To Die by Cynthia Murphy

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 6 Jan 2021

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Are you a teen who thrills to be terrified? This book is for you.
Promoted as “Point Horror for the social media generation” [The book is published by Scholastic]
We love the striking jacket design.

Young, brunette women are being attacked in London. 16-year-old, Irish-born Niamh has just arrived for a summer of freedom, and quickly discovers that the girls being attacked look frighteningly similar to her. Niamh is determined not to let her fear destroy her summer. But can her new friends be trusted? Will she be able to stay ahead of the attacker? Or will she be next? Packed with voice-driven whodunit storytelling, and a retro slasher-movie feel reminiscent of cult classics, this dark, pacy, and irresistibly-creepy debut really has something for everybody!

Last One to Die is a YA horror novel and you’ve mentioned that Point Horror has been a big influence for you. Can you tell us a bit more about your debut, and the inspiration behind it?

Last One to Die came about after a huge writing slump. I was actually trying to write something else when I started listening to a podcast called Lore and an episode about a creepy Victorian villain, Spring Heeled Jack. I had never heard of him, but it planted a little seed which I kept coming back to. I shelved what I was writing and started to brainstorm a teen horror. I have always been a huge fan of anything remotely scary so went and re-watched all of the classics from my teens – Scream, Final Destination, The Craft – and I knew that I wanted to write something scary but also fun. I wanted to recapture that feeling I had as a teen where I was thrilled to be terrified!

from Curtis Brown’s website

 

Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power

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A blistering horror-thriller  that will grip you from its very first page.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling Wilder Girls comes a twisty thriller about a girl whose past has always been a mystery – until she decides to return to her mother’s hometown, where history has a tendency to repeat itself . . .

Ever since Margot was born, it’s been just her and her mother. No answers to Margot’s questions. No history to hold on to. Just the two of them, stuck in their run-down apartment, struggling to get along. But that’s not enough for Margot. She wants family. She wants a past. And when she finds a photograph pointing her to a town called Phalene, she leaves. But when Margot gets there, it’s not what she bargained for. Margot’s mother left for a reason. But was it to hide her past? Or was it to protect Margot from what’s still there?


 

Point Horror 25th Anniversary

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Whatever happened to Point Horror? asks Beth Rodgers

irishtimes

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Point Horror imprint. In 1991, the British base of Scholastic publishers decided to rebrand a set of horror titles sent by its American counterpart and thus Point Horror was born. Written by the likes of RL Stine (who would go on to pen the more enduring Goosebumps series for younger readers), Caroline B Cooney and Diane Hoh, Point Horror books arrived thick and fast in the mid-90s. That was one of the best things about them from the reader’s perspective – there were always more on the way. The series dominated the children’s book charts in the ’90s. At their height, upwards of 15 books were published annually, plus omnibus editions of the most popular titles. By 2000 they had sold in the region of 7 million copies. And then they seemed to fizzle out.

Never use the wrong mug in a school staff room – Robert Muchamore’s worst author moments

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guardiansmallNever use the wrong mug in a school staff roomAfter an interesting morning talking to groups of kids in a London school, we went to the staff room for morning break. It was standing room only, and I was halfway through a cuppa when a bossy woman stormed up to me, screaming, “I’m the deputy head and you’re using my mug.”After apologising, and explaining that I was a guest and that the school librarian had made me a cup of tea, the deputy head stood with her hands on her hips, screaming at the librarian about respect for personal property.Once my tea was finished, I hid the deputy head from hell’s mug on top of a high cistern in the male staff toilet.

for more awful author moments:

Robert Muchamore’s CHERUB bloopers | Children’s books | The Guardian.

Charlie Higson: ‘Kids should have nightmares, they should be scared of things’

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Highly enlightening Guardian feature on Charlie Higson”

guardiansmall“There isn’t a set of rules about how scary you can make it,” says Higson, looking characteristically nice and respectable in his north London home (just down the road from the Waitrose). “So I used my youngest boy as a guinea pig. He was just 10, or maybe even nine, so he was a bit young. But I thought ‘I’ll see how scared he gets.’ ”

Higson read The Enemy to Sidney as a bedtime story, chapter by chapter as he wrote it. “And it was quite clear that he wasn’t getting scared at all. He was really enjoying it, and was saying ‘I love a bit of gore, but it’s not scary’ … Modern kids have been exposed to so much more. They watch all these DVDs they’re not supposed to, they look at stuff online particularly, and certainly when it comes to gore they’ve seen it all.” So Higson responded by “pushing it, making it grimmer and more violent and nastier, with more children getting killed and eaten”.

Eventually, he recalls, they were about halfway into the book and he’d gone to sleep, “defeated again”. But then, “at about four in the morning, there was a hammering on the door and Sidney came bursting in, floods of tears, shaking, sweaty, pyjamas stuck to his body, he’d had this really awful nightmare based on the book, and I thought ‘Woohoo!’ ”

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via Charlie Higson: ‘Kids should have nightmares, they should be scared of things’ | Books | The Guardian.

R.L. Stine’s Secret to Scaring the Crap Out of Kids

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Interview with R. L. Stine ahead of a busy month:

DailyBeast

October is a busy month for R.L. Stine.

The author behind the blockbuster Goosebumps and Fear Street book series—pulpy horror novels that became points of obsession for a generation of kids just learning that reading can be fun—has become expectedly accustomed to being associated with the ghouls, spooks, and scares of Halloween season.

“And then in November, they forget about me,” he jokes.

Not that, at least in this particular October, Stine isn’t a bit complicit in his in-demand status. The best-selling author—to the tune of over 400 million copies sold since his first Fear Street book in 1989—is busy promoting the return of his Emmy-winning TV series Saturday on The Hub network, The Haunting Hour: The Series, and just released the first new Fear Street book since ending the series in 1995.

via R.L. Stine’s Secret to Scaring the Crap Out of Kids – The Daily Beast.

Stephen King says, This is not a golden age of horror

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King is not so successful as to be above the fray, and he is sceptical about some of his more direct rivals in the mega-selling horror and fantasy categories. Contrary to popular opinion, he says, this is not a golden age of horror. What about the Twilight franchise? “I agree with Abra’s teacher friend [in Doctor Sleep] who calls Twilight and books like it tweenager porn. They’re really not about vampires and werewolves. They’re about how the love of a girl can turn a bad boy good.”

Sweet Valley High with teeth?

“Yeah. Pretend I said that.”

Does he read them out of professional interest?

“I read Twilight and didn’t feel any urge to go on with her. I read The Hunger Games and didn’t feel an urge to go on. It’s not unlike The Running Man, which is about a game where people are actually killed and people are watching: a satire on reality TV. I read Fifty Shades Of Grey and felt no urge to go on. They call it mommy porn, but it’s not really mommy porn. It is highly charged, sexually driven fiction for women who are, say, between 18 and 25. But a golden age of horror? I wouldn’t say it is. I can’t think of any books right now that would be comparable to The Exorcist.”

via Stephen King: on alcoholism and returning to the Shining | Books | The Guardian.