![]() Breaking bad is really just a choice you make inside yourself.” “Not to get political, but for me the actual inspiration was that idea of following a charismatic leader, even if everything that they’re saying is counterintuitive to you. “I have a cult in Small Town Monsters, and it’s loosely based on some real life cults like Nexium, which was in the news recently,” she says. “I think horror sometimes gives you the opportunity to say something about society without being an After School Special,” Rodriguez Wallach says. Kirkus Reviews named Small Town Monsters one of the 13 Scariest Books of 2021, YA or adult. But after that she published paperback YA romances (now out of print), followed by a trilogy of teen spy novels, and finally Small Town Monsters (Underlined Paperbacks, 2021), about a girl whose parents are demonologists, and a boy whose mother seems to be turning into something strange… It was a middle grade book told in a YA voice, she realizes now. Her first novel got her an agent, but never got published, in part because of the highly specific art of writing for young people. And in 2004, when she began to dream (literally) of writing fiction for kids and teens, her soon-to-be husband reminded her of their visit to Salem. By 2003 she had moved back to Philly and taken a job with a nonprofit. Then, like many people, she began to rethink her priorities after 9/11-the twin towers were five blocks from her apartment. Hotel and real estate journalism was fine, but not her true calling. When Rodriguez Wallace entered that Salem psychic’s shop, she was already thinking about shaking up her career. Not only did the psychic peg her as a writer-OK, she was a hotel-business reporter-but as an author of children’s books. On a vacation visit to Massachusetts circa 2002, she stopped in to see a Salem (Witch City) psychic as a lark. She grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, but her recent success as a novelist actually goes back a long way and to another of the Bay State’s spookier spots. “You can’t have a book with a bloody ax on the cover and not follow through,” Rodriguez Wallach says cheerfully. Things get more than a little Type A negative. The action plays out just about this time of year in Fall River, Mass., infamous for being the home of a young woman named Lizzie Borden. Just in time for Halloween, Rodriguez Wallach (COM’00) published her latest YA novel, and first hardcover, this month, the creepy thriller Hatchet Girls (Delacorte, 2023), where a group of high schoolers run afoul of an ancient evil in the woods. Author Diana Rodriguez Wallach’s 12-year-old daughter came to her book launch event a couple of weeks ago and told her afterward that she “slayed.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |