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 |

Meg Gardiner: An Amnesia Plot You Won’t Forget

Like many American thriller fans, I was introduced to Meg Gardiner two years ago, when Stephen King praised her to Entertainment Weekly readers after devouring her novels, which were only available in the U.K. at that point. It didn’t take long for her to find a publisher in New York—and, in addition to publishing the backlist that got King so excited, Dutton has also launched a new series from Gardiner, the second installment of which, The Memory Collector, has just come out. You may recognize one of its initial premises, which she explains below, from the movie Memento, but you’ll soon find that she’s taking the concept in a different direction…

Jo Beckett analyzes the minds of the dead. She’s a forensic psychiatrist who performs psychological autopsies in cases of equivocal death. When the police and medical examiner can’t determine why someone has died, Jo digs through the victim’s past to ascertain whether the death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. She calls herself a deadshrinker.

But in The Memory Collector Jo has a live patient. She handles the case as she would a psychological autopsy because Ian Kanan has short-term memory loss and can’t tell her what’s happened to him.

Anterograde amnesia—short-term memory loss—leaves old memories intact but destroys the ability to form new ones. Ian Kanan remembers everything about his life, right up until he suffers a brain injury. Thereafter, nothing sticks in his mind. Every few minutes, all the information he’s just gathered, all memory of his current experiences, simply fades. He can’t learn anything new. He can’t remember where he is or what he’s doing.

The idea for Kanan, the security contractor whose short-term memory has been destroyed, grew out of my brother’s true life experience working with brain-injured people. One man had short-term memory loss caused by a motorcycle crash. Every few minutes the man’s memory would evaporate. No matter how many times my brother saw him, the man always shook hands and introduced himself. At a rock concert, he continually shouted in surprise, “It’s the Grateful Dead!” The man was intelligent and personable. But he couldn’t remember from hour to hour what was going on. He didn’t even realize that he was forgetful.

So I thought: What if Jo were faced with a patient who can’t form new memories—and he’s a dangerous man? All Ian Kanan’s skills and military training, all his lethal abilities, are intact. If he disappears, planning to hunt down his enemies, could Jo track him down? If she found him, how could she stop him? Even if she convinced him to call off his vendetta, within minutes he’d forget, and pick up his gun again.

Then I thought: What if his memory loss is being caused by a contagious agent? What if he can infect others?

That was the genesis of The Memory Collector.

(more…)

10 July 2009 | guest authors |