I’ll be honest, there are a lot of aspects of preparing The Young House which are really stressing me out right now. Writing a book is easy…getting it packaged and prepared to be publicly presented is the problematic part. Even alliterating isn’t going to help me completely unwind though, so I thought I’d sit down and talk to you about how this book came to be. I could use a reminder why I actually do love this project and am terribly excited to share it with you.

This book was drafted in the summer of 2010. I had recently seen some scary animation out of Japan about evil little undead children, and that concept resonated with me. There is something fundamentally horrifying about corrupted innocence. Something that symbolically represents joy and naivety is all the more terrifying once you give it power and a malicious agenda…which is why the Chuckie films will always scare me more than Tremors. Worms are supposed to be disgusting and horrible, it doesn’t pain me to think about them being dangerous the way it bothers me to think about dolls going rogue.

It was more than that though. I was a young woman, still figuring out how to bridge into adulthood, when this idea hit me. I wanted to do a book about childhood in a macabre way. The Young House was an emotional experiment to explore what would happen if children were in a position of power over an adult. This book was written to be the horror story equivalent of Peter Pan. There is a distinct logic and mental makeup unique to children, and it was a cruel pleasure to watch that devour the maturity and grownup sanity that my main character embodied.