Author keen to scare children
New Zealand author Richard Fairgray is a writer, artist, and colourist, best known for his work in comic books such as Blastosaurus and Ghost Ghost, and he has written and illustrated several picture books, That’s Not the Monster We Ordered, My Grandpa Is a Dinosaur, and If I
Had an Elephant.
He is legally blind, totally blind in his left eye and has only 3 per cent vision in his right.
As a child Fairgray firmly believed he would grow up and eat all the candy he wanted and stay up as late as he liked.
By drawing pictures when he wasn’t meant to and reading all the things people told him not to, he has made this come true. He now splits his time between Los Angeles and Surrey, British Columbia.
Fairgray answers some questions about his middle grade graphic novel Black Sand Beach. The kids in Black Sand Beach deal with some pretty scary stuff, but they seem more excited than scared, why is that?
I think things are scarier when you have the time to stop and think about them, but I never really give my characters time to do that.
From the minute Lily and Dash get to the beach they’re confronted by a zombie sheep, magnetic sand, the sky getting dark at random times of day so from there it’s just an adventure that they can’t help but be on. Also, I think it’s way easier to be brave for someone else than for yourself, so the four kids sort of take turns being scared while the others step up.
You grew up in New Zealand, a place with plenty of beaches with black sand, but in the story you never specify where exactly this place really is, was that deliberate?
Yes. The reason I like stories about ghosts and monsters is that they can happen anywhere.
All the reader ever finds out is that Black Sand Beach is the place on the very edge of the world, which means it could be anywhere in the world. It’s probably no coincidence though that I spent a lot of my summers staying right by an actual haunted lighthouse here in New Zealand.
Have you always enjoyed horror stories? Absolutely, I love being scared and I love scaring people. I started writing ghost stories before I even started primary school.
As a kid I loved Goosebumps and Eerie Indiana and all those books of short horror stories about kids getting carried away by moths or cats speaking for no reason.
What do you think is the key to a good scary story?
Taking something ordinary and twisting it just a little bit. The best scary stories make your heart race, delight you but leave you thinking about them for a long time.
Often that’s as simple as putting something unusual in the wrong place. You can scare me with a big-fanged monster for a minute, but if I find corn cob holders in your toothbrush cup I am never going to stop wondering why they were there.