We are pleased to have a guest post from Caroline B. Cooney, author of more than ninety suspense, mystery, and romance novels for teenagers. Cooney’s books have sold over fifteen million copies and are published in several languages. In honor of our Horror In the Halls back-to-school ebook sale, Cooney shares insight into why she began writing horror thrillers.Check out Cooney’s ebooks and more thrilling reads on sale for just $1.99 through August 31.
Horror thrillers had become popular in YA, but I had never written any. My editor telephoned one day and said, “I have an assignment for you.” (It’s kind of like getting an English class assignment in school, except of course the author can say “No.”) “I want a trilogy,” she said, “that will be entry-level horror: horror for kids who want to be a little bit scared. Here are the rules: no blood, no gore, no violence, no drugs, no bad parents.”
Writing to assignment is probably like being an architect: Your client wants a particular type of house on a particular lot, and you have to make that work and make it terrific. I love the challenge of assignments. The original titles of that trilogy were Fog, Snow, and Fire. Later they were reissued as the Losing Christina series. Great fun to write, and the rules suited me. I think most parents are good, and work at being good. I like lots of action, but by the time I wrote Fog, I had lost my taste for gory detail.
Another assignment was crazy. The same editor called and said, “I’ve thought of a great title. The Perfume.” And so from that one word, I was to devise a terrifying story of 175 manuscript pages. This perfume, I realized, would have to do something dreadful, but since I wasn’t going to have violence, it would have to affect the soul. Should it damage the soul of the girl who wears the perfume? Or the souls of those who inhale the scent when she wears it? I needed a name for my perfume and I thought of many scary names, like Obsession. But that, like everything I came up with, actually was a perfume. I finally thought of Venom, and when I researched, it was not a copyrighted fragrance name. Of course once I’ve named my perfume Venom, I have to involve snakes—top-drawer horror material.
If you’re going to write horror stories, eventually you have to consider vampires. I don’t care for the whole neck bite, blood-sucking thing, but I figured, he’s my vampire; he’ll do what I tell him. The opening line in the first vampire book, Deadly Offer, is “‘Suppose,’ said the vampire, ‘that I could make you popular.’” So you, our heroine, will decide what aspects of popular girls in your school you wish to have. And it will be taken from them, and become yours. And that is the vampire’s pleasure: watching you destroy others.
Names are such fun. In fantastical stories like these, you use names that otherwise you wouldn’t saddle a cat with. I collect names from newspaper lists of honor roll students, or sports teams, or just settle on some interesting noun. In The Perfume, the two girls are named Dove and Wing. Once you have chosen a name for your character, that girl or boy begins to live and the writing flies along.
Sometimes people ask what the basic themes of my thrillers are. My main theme is to provide great entertainment for young readers. As a Christian, I also want to write parables. Very often it is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which we have to decide: Who is the good neighbor? The one who looks good or the one who pauses to help? No matter what your wonderful attributes, if you do not stop to help, you are not the good guy.
It’s usually necessary in thrillers to keep the adults offstage. Loving parents are not going to permit most of the action in your story, nor will teachers. So these books acquire creepiness just from the fact that the parents seem weirdly missing and the time in which the teenagers are alone expands. Plus once you have parents in the action, they take over, and I like the hero/heroine to solve the nightmare himself/herself.
I think I liked Freeze Tag best. I grew up in the 1950s, when our mothers insisted on something called “fresh air.” We came home from school, changed into our play clothes, and were required to stay outside until supper, getting our fresh air. We played yard games, which usually involved every kid of every age on the street. Most were chase variations, like red rover or freeze tag. I was always slightly frightened by pursuit. (I’ve written a lot of pursuit adventures, too, like Fatality and Wanted.) I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to write a book in which a person actually can freeze anybody she wants?
My title choices rarely made it onto the book. The editors picked the titles. I was usually happy with their decisions, except for Fatality. I think it’s one of my best books and I wanted to call it, Stealing Police Cars. Perhaps they thought that would incite some of my readers to crime.
My hope is to incite more reading. Isn’t it marvelous that we can now read on our phones and devices and access practically any book any time anywhere? However, I think a book-lined room is the most beautiful sight in the world.