Derek Landy
About Author
Before writing his children's story about a sharply-dressed skeleton detective, DEREK LANDY wrote the screenplays for a zombie movie and a murderous thriller in which everybody dies.
As a black belt in Kenpo Karate he has taught countless children how to defend themselves, in the hopes of building his own private munchkin army. He firmly believes that they await his call to strike against his enemies (he doesn't actually have any enemies, but he's assuming they'll show up, sooner or later).
Derek lives on the outskirts of Dublin, and the reason he writes his own biography blurb is so that he can finally refer to himself in the third person without looking pompous or insane.
Author link
Interview
DEMON ROAD
HARPERCOLLINS CHILDREN'S BOOKS
SEPTEMBER 2015
The bestselling author of Skulduggery Pleasant, Derek Landy, is back with the Demon Road trilogy, a full-throated horror road trip complete with demons, murderous parents and serial killers!
Set in the US, Demon Road embraces American horror and its road trip traditions. When Amber, an ordinary 16-year-old school girl, discovers she is also a demon, she is forced to leave home, hotly pursued by her demonic parents intent on murder (hers).
Amber sets off with Milo and his car - an apparently possessed Dodge Charger - with the aim of making her own deal with a powerful demon that will get her parents off her back. As you'd expect, not everything goes to plan....
We were thrilled to speak to Derek Landy about his new trilogy and he answered the following questions:
Q: How hard was it to leave Skulduggery Pleasant to start a new project?
A: It certainly wasn't easy. When you begin a new project, you don't want to repeat yourself and yet you want to deliver what the readers need; not what they want, but what they need.
Demon Road is written for young adults and that brings its own challenges and rewards. I wanted to write something for older readers because the Skulduggery Pleasant books have been steadily getting older, they start at nine years plus and end at eleven years plus.
I saw moving into YA (Young Adult) as a license to break free and try something new but to still appeal to the same core readership and try to take them along with me.
Q: Did you find writing Demon Road a very different experience from writing Skulduggery Pleasant?
A: It wasn't very different writing this book from writing Skulduggery Pleasant except for starting it when I stalled and hesitated. But once I was into the story, I found myself having the same amount of fun and same amount of enthusiasm as I ever did with Skulduggery Pleasant. I'm now a seasoned professional!
Q: This novel is full-blown horror, was that also to mark a move to different territory for you?
A: In a lot of ways horror is my natural fall back, I have always been a fan of the genre. Skulduggery Pleasant includes elements of adventure, sci-fi, comedy and crime but if you look at all these tropes and characters, you'll see it's horror that's the underpinning movement the whole way through the books.
With Demon Road, it was my chance to indulge and specialise in horror. The book is set in America, it's a road trip novel, and every episode and encounter and bad guy the characters come across offers another slice of American horror.
Basically this whole trilogy is a tip of the hat to American horror - Stephen King, Wez Craven, John Carpenter etc - and all the comic horror I spent my teenaged years indulging myself in.
Q: Is that why you've set the trilogy in America?
A: Actually, I was originally going to set it in Ireland and I also thought about the UK but when I realised it was a road trip I thought, why not set it in America? That's the home of the road trip after all.
I suppose you could try to do a road trip in Ireland but every five minutes you'll find yourself in another village, plus you can drive from one side of Ireland to the other in about three hours, whereas you can get lost in America. It was just the scope of it that I wanted, that epic feel that America can provide.
Q: Do you have any desire to go on a road trip yourself - and did you make the Demon Road trip yourself to help plan the book?
A: Unfortunately I didn't have the luxury of time to physically go to America as I had to get this book written so I'm afraid to say I did my road trip virtually from Ireland. While I was writing, I had Google Earth open and Street View so I was on the streets but in an online way.
Demon Road represents three months of intense, social life-wrecking work. We're planning to produce each new book in the trilogy every six months, so I don't have long to write them and my deadlines are a lot more rushed than usual. It means that everything I write has to be right the first time and for me, having this kind of deadline is like flicking a switch; because I have to get it right, I make it work.
So I would love to have the time to do a road trip - although thinking about it, would I love to take six months off and travel the US? Probably not. I think I would go crazy because I would be away from home and from the source of my joy which is writing. I am happy travelling in my mind and imagination - and in my car, if I need to.
Q: So how did you plan your route and what inspired your choice of car?
A: I decided I wanted to start in Florida because that is a place that I know and I wanted to take my characters across the US and to visit Oregon, Chicago and to end in New York. So I had my plot and encounters and I had to decide which places would offer the diversity of location and background characters that I would need. That was the primary focus and that's how I decided on the route.
As soon as I realised this was going to be a road trip, I also realised that Amber would need a car and as I'm a fan of American 'muscle cars' [these are American-made sports cars designed for speed], I decided on a 1970s Dodge Charger, one of the most beautiful cars of the time.
There's something that is essentially and uniquely American about the idea of the 'killer car', like Stephen King's Christine - that idea of a car relentlessly pursuing you with a mind of its own. So I decided to indulge in another trope and give Amber a killer car that might have a mind of its own, in subtle ways.
Q: Why did you decide to make Amber a demon rather than, say, a vampire?
A: Why a demon? It was the imagery of the red skin and the horns of the demons that I wanted. I didn't want to make Amber a vampire because that is seen as a super power; all of those things like werewolves and vampires are creatures that people can aspire to be, whereas with a demon you know it's just bad. There's nothing aspirational there.
Also I didn't want to drag in all the baggage that comes attached when you're turning a character into a vampire. With vampires, the reader has certain expectations because there is a whole range of vampire styles and I didn't want that. I just wanted something incredibly simple and not to have a whole load of questions about what the character can or can't do.
Q: How does being a demon work for Amber?
A: Amber is a normal girl, she's 16 and she's not the prettiest or the thinnest girl in town and she has doubts about herself, her appearance and her personality, and yet suddenly she discovers that she can turn into a demon that is strange and beautiful, but also a bit of a psychopath.
The more Amber uses her demonic abilities, the more she will turn to the dark side and that was the attraction in writing this series. Here is a girl who recognises that she turns into a demon and in doing so can become all the things she wants to be; but as a demon she is also more capable of violence and evil and I was fascinated with how she would deal with that over the course of three books.
Q: You pair Amber with Milo, but he doesn't say very much. How tricky was that to write when you have just two characters in a car for long periods?
A: Once I had put Amber and Milo in a car together and realised they weren't speaking, I knew I'd need another character. Amber needed someone who talks in order to open up. That's where Glen comes in. He's Irish, he's funny and annoying, and he completes the triumvirate.
It's so much fun to write dialogue and traditionally that's where I have been at my strongest so I had a lot of fun with Glen.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about how you pit the generations against each other in Demon Road?
A: The whole point of the book is that gap between the older and younger generations. Obviously this is fiction and YA and horror and so you take that gap and remake it, widen it and give it teeth.
To Amber, it's her story, but to her parents, it's about them. That seems so wrong and it's potent because it is wrong: parents should be passing everything on to their children but these guys aren't like that, it's all about them. So in a lot of ways the story is about the gap between the generations.
Q: Can you give us a glimpse into books two and three of Demon Road?
A: It is my job in the next book [coming March 2016] to deliver the same things as in book one but in a completely new way. In book one, because it is a road trip, you're meeting new people and finding a whole new story every few chapters, so the reader never gets tired or loses patience.
In book two, I wanted to do the same thing but in a different way. In book two Amber and Milo find a town to hunker down in but you'll also find multiple storylines criss-crossing and this will touch on other tropes of US horror.
Book three will have to resolve the case and the question of who is Amber, demon or human? There will be come-uppance and resolution. It might be a happy, sad or tragic ending, it doesn't matter, but there will be closure and everything will come full circle.
SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT: THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
PUBLISHED BY HARPERCOLLINS
AUGUST 2014
The last book in the amazing Skulduggery Pleasant series is just around the corner. Skulduggery and Stephanie finally confront the evil Darquesse who plans to turn the world to cinders. Will they be in time? Who will win this spectacular showdown? And what will become of Skulduggery, the wise-cracking skeleton detective, once this last battle is done...?
We asked Irish author Derek Landy to tell us more about the Skulduggery Pleasant books, about writing, about ending this epic series, and about what comes next....
Q: The Skulduggery Pleasant books have become a global success with a huge online following, but what got you into writing in the first place?
A: I have always wanted to be a writer and the unfortunate part of that is that when you know you're going to be a writer and you're not satisfied with anything but being a writer, you don't focus on anything else. At school I was a day dreamer and I didn't do well because I didn't pay attention. I messed up my exams, eventually got into art college and was kicked out after the first year so I went to work on the family farm. I started working there full time when I was 20 and got the idea for Skulduggery Pleasant when I was 30, so I spent ten years working on the farm and as tortuous as it was, it turned out to be invaluable. During that time I taught myself to write and I really honed my craft.
Q: How did you manage to find time to write, given that farm work starts so early and ends so late?
A: I would get up early and work late on the farm and it's horrible, horrible work but it's physical so I developed a knack of working with my hands but my mind was free, I would write in my head, and come up with a dialogue and then the next bit and I'd repeat that and go forward, so everything is literally written in my mind. I'd go over the words so much that by lunch time all it took was to eat fast and go to the computer and it would all come out. So I taught myself to write when I was not actually writing; when I did get to a pen or keyboard, I'd just transcribe.
Q: One of the things we love about Skulduggery Pleasant is the dialogue; how did you get to be so good at writing that?
A: That was because I focused on writing screen plays, which is where I learned how to write. My books are pretty much structured like screen plays because that is how I think and the glorious thing about writing screen plays is that it is mostly dialogue.
I have always loved the 1940's fast-talking, private eye characters played by people like Howard Hughes or Humphrey Bogart. When I was three I developed a stammer and that lasted into my 20's so I was never able to speak fast and when I'd watch Humphrey Bogart and Carry Grant speaking so quickly, I fell in love with dialogue and with fast dialogue especially. So, like anyone here in Ireland, Skulduggery has the gift of the gab; dialogue is my speciality.
Q: What gave you the idea for a series based on a skeleton detective...?
A: I was in London to get my third film made. It was 2005, I was in a terrible hotel in Piccadilly Circus that was all I could afford. It was the middle of summer and it was hot and sticky, there was no air and I was pacing around my hotel room when the two words 'Skulduggery Pleasant' came into my head as a name.
I don't know where it came from, I wasn't thinking about skeletons or words or writing, it just came into my head. The moment those two words appeared, they told me everything about him, who he was, what he was like. I remember the feeling when it happened and the sense that this was different somehow from all my earlier ideas, I knew it would mean something if I developed it.
I wrote the first 30 pages and sent it to my agent, who had always been on at me to do text not screen plays; she got back to me and said, keep it going. I ended up writing a massive book that was twice as long as the finished version, we edited it down to half its size ourselves, so there was a six month period between me writing it, editing it down and rewriting it and then we sent it off and within two weeks, there was a bidding war for the book.
I have so many amazing memories from this period but one stands out. I had just dropped my parents off at the airport, they were going to a wedding, and my mum had always worried about me because I was the one kid who had never applied myself to anything, I was the black sheep of the family, and on this drive I remember my mum telling me that there was a job opening with a company looking for someone to deliver mattresses. I said I'd stick with the writing for a little bit longer and she was saying, well maybe it's time to jack it in, try something else. Then I went to my favourite comic shop in Dublin - I couldn't afford to buy anything - and then my agent called to tell me that there were seven or eight publishers who really, really wanted to publish Skulduggery Pleasant. Of course I called my mum at the airport and said, 'You'll never guess what Mum...' and I think she had a very nice wedding because she told absolutely everyone what had happened!
Q: Did Skulduggery change much as your wrote about him?
A: Skulduggery came fully fledged, he was always who he is now, always fast-talking, always arrogant and in control of his emotions. He's very capable and practical - and arrogant, but that's something I believe to be an unappreciated virtue, the proper kind of arrogance can elevate you so much. He was the one character who didnt need any work, I immediately knew who he was, a hero who is haunted by his past and like everyone in these books, he's compromised.
When you set out to write nine books, the characters have to be a multitude of things. At the start, Skulduggery is very much driven by the need for revenge and is consumed by his past and the terrible things he has done but during the series, from the moment he achieves some kind of vengeance, he's lost because without his anger, who is he? It's Valkyrie who gives him his purpose and he realises that his life is now about redemption, and that comes to a head in the final book.
Q: What can we expect from the last book in the series?
A: I have carefully cultivated a reputation with my readers of being thoroughly malicious; I will give them a character to love and have tattooed on their arms and then I will kill them, because it's so much fun to do that.
It started in book three because, frankly, Skulduggery had too many friends so I had to kill some of them off and the readers started not to trust what I'd do to my characters, or that I'd provide a happy ending. But I also have a reputation for subverting what they expect so these nine books have been a huge game of misdirection and, as with the final one, they don't know what to expect.
The main plot lines will be tied up in a very iron clad manner, it's basically about redemption. By the last book, Valkyrie / Stephanie has turned to evil but there's always hope. The books in the series get darker and darker as the readership gets older, but no matter how dark it gets, there's always hope.
Valkerie has changed the most, she is a good guy but if she was as good a person as she's been telling people, she would have given up the magic years ago, once she'd realised that she's destined to become the villain. She should have walked away from magic but she didn't; she's prepared to die for her friends but she's also amazingly selfish and compromised. So by the time of the ninth book, the Valkyrie we know is no more but that's not to say there's no hope for her; even in the worst villain there are moments of humanity.
Stephanie, Valkyrie's 'reflection', has been a lot of fun to write. She stepped out of the mirror in the early books to take over Valkyrie's life while Valkyrie's on her missions and to do the boring things like go to school and eat Sunday dinner. Then it goes wrong and she slightly malfunctions and develop secrets and desires of her own. There's a moment in one of the books where readers say, she's the villain, she's horrible, and then you get to the next book and half way through, Stephanie is doing something nice and decent.
It's a game of always wrong-footing the audience but staying true to the character. It's been so much fun to have a hero who turns into the villain and the villain turns into a hero - and the hero and villain are the same person!
Q: What have been your favourite moments with Skulduggery and Valkyrie?
A: There have been many scenes and chapters throughout the series that I'm delighted with, and with these two characters in particular. For Valkyrie, it tends to be the scenes with her family that I enjoyed the most because you can write the fight scenes and there are villains and horror and fantasy - and the books are full of these things - but then you get the quieter moments when she's with her parents and her new sister.
I wrote those scenes at the time my sister had children and I was suddenly surrounded by these children who you had never met before and you know you're going to see them grow up and it's instant love and that's what I wanted to give Valkyrie with her sister, those moments when she's allowed to be a girl and a sister.
Skulduggery writes himself and he gives himself the best entrances and exits and words, he's never let me down, but again my favourite moments with him are not the big loud fights or quips but the moments of introspection when he looks at how the last few hundred years have affected him as a person. So for both of them, it's the quiet moments that I loved the most.
Q: What will life be like for you without Skulduggery and Valkyrie?
A: I reckon I'm going to miss them immensely and I'm waiting for the moment that it becomes real. It's over in one sense, because the book is written, but we're not not there yet because the process of publishing it goes on. Once you've finished writing it, then you edit it, then you approve the proofs etc. I'm also doing a huge amount for the publication, touring etc, so I have stopped thinking about what the 'last book' means.
Q: You've built up a huge following on social media for Skulduggery Pleasant - how did that happen?
A: The community itself has created that. If a publisher took on a book and said they wanted to build up a community around it, that would never work. You can't make it happen like that, it's either there or it isn't, and the Skulduggery Pleasant community built itself up.
I didn't have anything to do with it but I have been able to watch it grow and it's the most astonishing thing you can hope for as a writer to see all these people coming together through your books, many of them people who were kids, loners, didn't fit in but who have found themselves surrounded by friends. Many friendships have been formed online. It's astonishing, you can't really explain it, but it's wonderful to witness and the Skulduggery fans are the happiest and warmest people you could hope to come across booksellers have also commented on how lovely they are during signings.
Q: Can you tell us what you're writing now?
A: I'm quarter of the way through writing the first book of whatever my next series will be. At one stage I found myself floundering because I felt something was missing in my writing and I realised I was missing the relationship between Skulduggery and Valkyrie but I couldn't change what I was doing to bring that in. If I had wanted to imitate it, I should have just continued the old series, so the new one just has to be completely different - and that was my first understanding of how writing will be from now on for me.
The new series is different from Skulduggery Pleasant, it's more horror and more thriller, it's less jokey which is something I struggle with. On the other hand, it is nice to write something different and to be writing in a different tone.
I want to keep the same publication dates with the next series as the Skulduggery Pleasant books, which is the very beginning of August, because I have built up a momentum with my readers of bringing out one book a year at that time. I want to continue that momentum and rhythm that the readers have come to expect, so I'm not going to pause it.
Q: What is happening with the first Skulduggery Pleasant movie?
A: There will be an announcement soon about the way forward for the film of Skulduggery Pleasant, so watch this space....
Q: Will we ever see Skulduggery Pleasant as a comic strip?
A: I am such a comic fan that it would have to be done right, I would want a proper comic artist and completely new material. I've no interest in seeing the book as a comic but seeing the characters in a comic would be fine.
Q: What do you do to relax when you're not writing?
A: I love sitting down at the end of the day to watch a movie or television, my mind has to 'unspool' before I can sleep - or I play video games, anything creative or that has a story or character like comics or TV.
In my spare time I train in self-defense although as we speak I'm sporting a sprained wrist and a crick in my neck. I started out in martial arts and gave it up and went into self defense it has given me my only official qualification I am a qualified bodyguard. I just wanted to see if I could do it and to have the skills inherent without any intention of using it. Now I'm my own bodyguard! So that's what I do to unwind, I hurt people and I'm hurt by them....
My life has changed dramatically as a published author, but it's a mark of how good your life is that something you thought you'd never be doing is the one thing you come to hate and I hate touring. I like being at events and signings and meeting readers, I genuinely love meeting them, it's just that I can't stand being on tour the airports and hotels you have to pass through.
I am forced to go to Australia and New Zealand every two years - something that thousands of other writers would love to be forced to do! - but for me it's an unfortunate part of being a writer. So when others are seeing the day that all tours are doing via Skype and worrying about it, I'm going, 'yeah, bring it on!'
Skulduggery Pleasant (Skulduggery Pleasant, Book 1)
