Today Sam Fern joins us in The Reading Realm to talk about his new book, WHERE THE DEAD LIVE, which is illustrated by Rômolo D’Hipólito…
Before we settle down in The Reading Realm for a chat, what’s your drink and snack of choice?
An oat milk hot chocolate, a bag of salted popcorn, and a bucket of tap water, please!
Tell us about your book in three sentences and then three words!
My latest book is a globetrotting tour of cultural imaginations about the dead! Parade through soulful celebrations, delve into crypts, tombs, and catacombs, and venture into ancient afterlives. Here is Where the Dead Live.
Ghosts, graves & gatherings!
If one of your characters could come to dinner, who would you invite and what would you cook them? What do you think you’d talk about?
The nameless protagonist of Escape Castle Dracula, because they are you, and I want to hear what you did the day after eluding a monster mash of literary horrors. I would make pizzas.
What’s the funniest word you know that always makes you laugh?
Archipelago, because my mum mispronounced it one single time, and for no reason at all has never been allowed to forget it. So it makes me think of my family, and that’s plenty enough to get me laughing.
What’s the silliest or strangest thing you’ve ever researched for a story?
The little-known pirate cemetery off the coast of Madagascar, where many dangerous and unruly people duly paid their respects to each other, carving out a peaceful garden in a lawless island, in the shadow of shipwrecks and under constant threat of discovery.
Do your characters ever surprise you?
I demand it of them, and if they fail, they get fired.
If your writing desk could speak, what would it say about you?
It would wonder why I cover it with a thousand things I should be doing all at once, when just one thing at a time would get each one done quicker.
Did you like reading when you were a child? If so, what?
I liked to read books I felt like I’d found for myself – even if I was mostly finding them on my brothers’ bookshelves – and very little patience for much of what I was told to read at school. I still think books should be laid rather subtly in the path of children rather than hurled at them like toys. My core childhood bookshelf was The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell – an unmatched fantasy world of sky pirates, gruesome creatures, and floating rocks – with that grand stack surrounded by authors like Darren Shan, Eoin Colfer, Anthony Horowitz, and Charlie Higson. Between all those, I’m still pretty sure that a dark family secret will send me on an adventure…
What’s your favourite book that isn’t yours?
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: a family drama equal parts ice and fire.
What book do you wish you could read for the first time again?
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. That feverish feeling of first stepping into the dreamlike, nightmarish halls of Gormenghast cannot be replicated.
What’s the funniest thing a child has said to you?
When showing my niece my puzzle book, Escape Castle Dracula, she listened very carefully to my explanation of one challenge, frowned a little to herself, and then with absolute confidence said, “No, I don’t think that’s how to do it…”
If you weren’t an author, what would you be?
For currently riding a hectic tricycle of writing for myself, editing others, and working in a library, chopping off the writing would leave me on a wonky bicycle, but if I’d really never taken to books at all – somehow never meeting literary bears Winnie or Paddington – I would rather fancy being a craftsperson in a theatre/film props studio (and currently have a novel on the go to partly live out this dream…).
What BAD advice would you give to someone who wants to be a writer?
Focus entirely on the ideal situation of writing your own work in solitude full-time!
The rosy dream of this career can often look like being left entirely alone with only a computer for company, hammering out words for nine hours a day – but if all you’re doing is heaving buckets of water out of the creative well, you’re going to strain your arms, break the bucket, snap the rope, and drain that well dry.
SPEED ROUND:
Cake or biscuits? Biscuits.
Dinosaurs or unicorns? Dinosaurs.
Pirates or astronauts? Pirates.
Museums or theme parks? Theme parks.
Cats or dogs? Dogs.
Summer or winter? Winter.
Aliens or robots? Robots.
THANK YOU Sam for joining us in The Reading Realm today!
