Best books I never wrote
Deborah Challinor, left, author of
From the Ashes, talks us through the books she wishes he’d written.
Boy’s Life by Robert R McCammon
This is the story of a year in the life of 11-year-old Cory Mackenson, who lives in Zephyr, Alabama, during the 1960s. Zephyr is a small town filled with genuine magic and mystery, heightened when Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake, its driver handcuffed to the steering wheel. No, it’s not strictly a crime novel, but a beautifully written account of a boy’s transition into young adulthood and his realisation that the world contains good and evil, with some supernatural bits thrown in for seasoning.
Union Street by Pat Barker
Her first book, this is a series of cleverly interrelated vignettes about seven working-class women who live on the same crappy street in a depressed industrial city in northeast England. The women range in age from an 11-year-old
who is raped, to a dying 70-year-old. The writing is raw and the subject matter bleak. It’s very real. Critics liked it but some people thought it over-referenced ‘‘menstruation, childbirth and back-street abortion’’. You know, those things that women have always had to deal with. I loved the book – it inspired me to write what I write.
The Passage by Justin Cronin
This story begins when things go horribly wrong at a secret US government facility, and 12 ‘‘experiments’’ escape and infect the world with a virus that turns people into particularly bestial
vampires. The first chapters are packed with action, panic and dread as the virus spreads, and great scenes like the train leaving Philadelphia with the Virals picking off the carriages one by one. Then suddenly we’re in a postapocalyptic world where civilisation has been smashed, everyone rides horses and is evervigilant against the Virals. And of course there’s Amy, one of the 12, but not one of them. You just know she’s going to be the key to everything. The Passage is the first book in Justin Cronin’s truly monumental trilogy, and is followed by The Twelve and The City of Mirrors.
The Sookie Stackhouse novels (aka The Southern Vampire Mysteries, aka True Blood) by Charlaine Harris
This is actually a series of 13 books. I got the first one out of a bargain bin for $1. Wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. But once I started, I couldn’t stop and had to buy the rest. The series is set in Louisiana and is populated by vampires, werewolves, faeries and other magical beings, with Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic humanfaerie hybrid, caught up in the middle. If you squint, you can see that Charlaine Harris has written a modern (and extended) version of the classic fairytale, her stories
encompassing good and evil, magic, royalty, and universal lessons. True, she might not be the most technically accomplished of writers, but she’s a supremely good storyteller, and isn’t that the point?