The finalists for this year’s Washington State Book Award include two Spokane authors: Lora Senf and Travis Baldree.
Senf writes spooky novels for middle-grade readers, and earlier this year, her book The Nighthouse Keeper won a Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in horror writing.
SPR’s Owen Henderson spoke with her about her work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: You and your second book, The Nighthouse Keeper, are finalists for the WSBA for Young Readers this year. It's part of a series, so can you just give us a peek inside the world of Blight Harbor?
LORA SENF: Oh, I'm happy to. Blight Harbor books center on the town of Blight Harbor, which is the seventh most haunted town in America.
Our main character is Evie von Rathe, and she's almost 13. She lives with her Aunt Desdemona because her parents disappeared when she was younger. One day, Des disappears, and Evie goes after her. And that's when she meets a creature that makes a deal with her. She ends up in sort of an other world, a world parallel to ours and has an adventure to get her aunt back.
Nighthouse Keeper starts where that one leaves off, and she is determined to never go back to that strange place again. Unfortunately, things in Blight Harbor aren't going as they should.
The ghosts of Blight Harbor are going missing. Evie, being who she is, goes to look for them. One thing leads to another, and she finds herself back on what she comes to find out is called the “Dark Sunside.”
OH: Lots of people feel a real pull toward spooky or macabre books as young readers. How do you then end up as the adult who writes those stories?
LS: Well, for me, I was always a reader. I was one of those kids that was — I don't remember not reading.
But I discovered spooky books when I was very young. They were the books of John Bellairs, who wrote The House with the Clock in Its Walls. They made that into a movie a few years ago. But he wrote gothic horror for kids. And for me, that was it. I was hooked.
And I wanted to be a writer. The problem was, I had a very loud voice in my head — and I still do, and I think it's tied to anxiety, frankly — that tells me that I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not special enough to do this. So I didn't.
For decades, I didn't. And it wasn't until a few years ago that I said, ‘You know, something's missing. And I think it's writing.’
And what mattered to me? Well, the stories that mattered most to me were the spooky stories from childhood. And I really wanted to tell a spooky story. But I wanted to center a character with anxiety, because that was who I was as a kid.
I didn't know it at the time. They didn't diagnose anxiety for children when I was a kid. But I thought, ‘Okay, what if we take a young character with anxiety and drop her in a very scary story? But we give her all the tools she needs to deal with her anxiety, and to be the hero despite it.’
OH: You mentioned The House with the Clock in Its Walls. What were some of the other pieces of media that inspired you to start creating your own worlds?
LS: Coraline is an enormous inspiration for me. I started reading Stephen King way too young. And I have said that Blight Harbor is sort of my Castle Rock, because I do tell Evie's stories out of Blight Harbor.
But the book coming out, the fourth book that's coming out next year, is a prequel set 100 years before. And then I've got a fifth book planned the following year that'll be set in the 90s. The town is kind of the heart of all of it. This strange town where impossible things happen.
OH: So these Blight Harbor books are for middle grade readers. How do you find the right tone when you're bringing in elements like anxiety to an already spooky genre?
LS: That's a great question. And I've been asked this before, and I'm afraid my answer is probably not very satisfying. A lot of it is you kind of go by gut.
And some people can do it and some people can't. And that's not a critique of the writer. I think just not every writer necessarily has a middle-grade voice inside of them.
I still identify very much with that version of myself. And so I can remember what that age felt like. I have kids that are close to that age, which is very helpful because I sort of know where their boundaries and their lines are for some of the scary stuff.
I think when you're writing for kids, especially middle-grade kids, you have to be honest with them, but you don't have to tell them every truth that you know. And again, that's kind of a judgment call, right? You know, I don't lie to my young readers, but I don't tell them every scary thing in the world either. I try to find a balance between those two things.
And you can't talk down to them. Kids are the coolest audience, frankly. They are so smart and so brave and they still have this amazing capacity for believing that maybe magic is real and it makes them just a tremendous audience.
But if you talk down to them, they're going to drop you. They're going to walk away because they know they're being talked down to. So it is —- unfortunately, I don't have, like, a magic answer for this.
It's just sort of — you do it by feel and you learn over time what works, I think.
