Catherine Jinks & Her Slacker Vampires

Australian novelist Catherine Jinks recently came to New York on a bit of business and a bit of holiday, so when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the American publishers for her YA novels, invited several journalists, children’s librarians, and book bloggers to meet her for lunch, I took the opportunity to ask her about the origins of her latest novel to be published here, The Reformed Vampire Support Group, which turn out to have nothing to do with a certain quartet of novels about dreamy not-so-adolescent bloodsuckers…

I’m looking forward to reading this novel, but I actually started with one of her earlier books, Evil Genius, which reads like a sly, subversive parody—and not just of Bond supervillians, but of that whole Harry Potter mode of storytelling that lovingly traces every step in the development of the special child destined for greatness. Only in this case Cadel Piggott is a genius hacker, and he’s being groomed to take over the world because his mentors believe ordinary people are too stupid not to ruin things if left to their own devices. I’m about a third of the way through, I can’t quite figure out where it’s going next, and I’m looking forward to finding out.

13 July 2009 | interviews |