Postcard For Reader

Classic Haunts (& Giveaways)

This giveaway is over.

There are the classics. There are the spin offs. There are the mash ups.

And every Halloween, we get to deal with all three. (And hey, if you read the whole post, you're rewarded with a giveaway at the bottom!)

Classics are a huge part of any Halloween. You have the classic spooks, the classic literature, the classic women. (Hey, if we're talking about classics, I have to put Jane Eyre in there. It's my favorite. Besides, Bertha Mason is craaaazy.)

And you have the spin offs, which are just as much fun to read. They're sequels, prequels, or just books that were inspired because of the originals.

And the authors know what they're doing. They not only love the book that inspired their novel - but they love Halloween as well! Take Clare B. Dunkle for instance. She loves Wuthering Heights, which inspired House of Dead Maids - and she loves Halloween as well!

Halloween isn't my big day. That's November 2nd, the Day of the Dead, when I hear Mass for my departed relatives and friends and then go visit the graveyard. But I never pass a graveyard at any time of year without saying a prayer. It shows the dead respect and lets them know they aren't forgotten. So every day is Halloween to me!

Check out some of these books, inspired by classics such as Dracula, Phantom of the Opera and Jane Eyre!

And then, of course, there are mash ups. Fun to read, fun to look at, and curious in general to behold. (Just don't give them to an English professor. They'd flip.) Erica has a particular problem with them - they have yet to do Pride and Prejudice and Pixies! Scurry on over to her blog to read more about that.

And Lynn Messina, author of Little Vampire Women, was kind enough to donate a signed copy for one lucky winner to read! When asked why she wanted to write LVM, she said:

I decided to put vampires in Little Women when I came across the passage in the book in which Amy, who is always using the wrong word to describe something, calls Aunt March "a regular samphire." Jo corrects her: "She means vampire, not seaweed, but it doesn't matter. It's too warm to be particular about one's parts of speech." When I read that, it all just clicked.

Ben Winters is the author of some of the more popular mashups - just take Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters! For him, it's all about the scares.

In two “mash-up novels”, I’ve combined literary classics with what’s called genre fiction: I mixed up Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility with pirates, submarines, and supernatural weirdness to create Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and then I took Leo Tolstoy’s romantic masterpiece and re-cast it as a science fiction novel called Android Karenina.

Both books involved a lot of silly violence and horror: A young English girl with a demonic crustacean trying to tear out her throat, a Russian skating rink besieged by gravity-distorting terrorists, that sort of thing.

My newest book, though not a mash-up novel... contains no decapitations, no space-ship explosions, and not a single rampaging pirate. The terrors depicted in this book are more of the familiar terrors of young-adult life: mean teachers, hard tests, forgotten locker combinations, and so on. There’s one part, towards the end, where my hero, a girl named Bethesda Fielding, has done something really bad and is in deep trouble. Writing that chapter, I had vivid and unsettling flashbacks of various times in my career as a kid where I was in deep trouble; remembered the awful, nauseating feeling of awaiting punishment.

I’ve never faced a giant mutant octopus, but I have faced angry assistant principals, and I can’t imagine the terror inspired by one is any worse than the other.

The thing is, every book is a scary book, or ought to be anyway. In a horror novel, we are scared for the hero’s physical safety. In a non-horror book, we are scared for their emotional well-being, for their fate and future. If the author has performed the necessary magic of fiction -- has made the reader feel empathy for the characters -- then we turn the pages with our hearts in our throats, anxious about what might happen next. We’re scared.

Part of what made my mash-up books fun to write (and, hopefully, to read) was erasing that distinction between one kind of literary fearfulness (“I fear Elinor Dashwood will never find true love!”) and the more over-the-top kind (“I fear Elinor will be eaten alive by that gigantic, acid-spraying jellyfish!”)

But my goal as a writer is to make my readers scared for the people I create -- even when they’re not being attacked by man-eating fish.

And there are so many other mashups! Here are the covers for a whole bunch - just click to read more.

Lesley at YA Books Reviewed just posted a review of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, so you should check that out. (Do it.)

But all this reading about these classic haunts has not been for nothing! Ignore that horrible grammar. I have a GIVEAWAY for you guys! Yes, yes I do. I have two of the lovely spin-offs up for giveaway - The House of Dead Maids, a prequel to Wuthering Heights, and The Jumbee, based off of Phantom of the Opera - as well as some other lovely Halloween related books. All YOU have to do is fill out the form to enter! It ends on Halloween - and, sorry international peeps, it's for Americans only.

Quick Recap:
[9] books up for grabs
[1] winner recieves
- The House of Dead Maids by Clare D. Bunkle
- The Jumbee by Pamela Keyes
- The Hollow by Jessica Verday
- The Fallen by Thomas Sniegowski
- Crusade by Nancy Holder & Debbie Viguie
[1] winner recieves
- Little Vampire Women by Lynn Messina, autographed
- Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben Winters, autographed
- Android Kareina by Ben Winters, autographed
- Emma and the Vampires by Wayne Josephson
[2] winner in the U.S. only
ends October 31 - Halloween!

How To Win:
[mandatory] fill out the forms below

You can enter both giveaways!