Freaks: Alive, on the Inside!

Annette Curtis Klause broke new ground in young adult literature with The Silver Kiss, a book that is at once "sexy, scaring, and moving," according to Roger Sutton writing in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. A vampire love story, Klause's first novel is a darkly seductive thriller with heart and message.

Born in Bristol, England, in 1953, Klause became fascinated with grisly things at an early age. "My mother read and sang to me," Klause explained. "But my daddy used to sit me on his lap and tell me the plots to gangster and monster movies. I knew all about Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Jimmy Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson before I ever saw any of their movies." Her father also let her speak to Willoughby, an imaginary little boy who lived down his throat.

When she was seven, Klause and her family moved north to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She recalls that her first experience with creative writing occurred when she was incapacitated with a twisted ankle at age eight or nine. Klause wrote a poem about her mother ironing and decided from then on to save all her poems in a notebook. Soon she was writing and illustrating her own books, mostly about a cat and the kittens she has. At age ten she and a neighborhood friend began making up plays and performing them on a tape recorder. "The plays usually involved some kind of humorous mistake," Klause recalled, "like a woman calling up a plant nursery instead of a nursery school for her child."

It was also about this time when Klause wrote her first (unpublished) bit of horror, The Blood Ridden Pool of Solen Goom. Each of the chapters ended with ". . . and more blood flowed into the blood ridden pool of Solen Goom." Increasingly she read fantasy and science-fiction books, in addition to Mark Twain and, as she got older, the beatnik books of Jack Kerouac. "I wanted desperately to be a beatnik," she remembered. She also read her first vampire book at age fourteen: Jane Gaskell's The Shiny Narrow Grin, which was Klause's initial inspiration for her first novel many years later. "I was smitten by the pale young man who appeared in a few suspenseful scenes," Klause related, "and became mesmerized with the whole concept of vampires." Initially, Klause responded to this fascination by writing poetry, which she described as "a pretentious, over-written, dreadful sequence of poems interspersed with prose called The Saga of the Vampire[also unpublished]." These early writings would later become invaluable for Klause when she set out on the journey of her first novel.

Klause's life was distinctly changed when she was fifteen and her father moved the family to Washington, DC, for career reasons. In high school Klause continued writing poetry. After finishing college in 1976, Klause went on to graduate school in library science. She took poetry workshops in college, but poetry was soon replaced by short stories once she graduated and started working in libraries. Klause began sending her work out to magazines, collecting numerous rejection letters. Several of her poems and a short story were published in anthologies and small magazine reviews, but it took several years of concerted effort to find her voice and her audience.

"I finally took a writing workshop with Larry Callen, a well-known children's writer," Klause noted. "I knew I wanted to write for young people. I'm still working through my own adolescence, so it seemed appropriate. I continued with further ones. I still go to the writing group Larry Callen introduced me to, and often chuckle about how an idea or action will affect the people in my group even as I am writing." Klause soon graduated from short stories, and with the help and encouragement of Callen, set to work on a novel. "I wanted to write for teenagers, so I thought back to what I liked to read at that age. In a way, I stole from myself with The Silver Kiss, because I looked at my old writing notebooks and found the vampire poem I had written as a t