I was asked to write a post about one of my novels for Shepherd.com, an innovative new site for books and authors, whose tag line is “Discover the Best Books.”
I suggested that I write one with Lisa Snellings about our collaborative novel, Night Birds. Here’s the description of the novel:
In Night Birds, Lucy's grandmother, Annie Maude, may be a witch, her school's lunch lady might be a murderer, and a mysterious figure stalks her in the small South Carolina town where she lives. The chapters consider themes of mental illness, religion, sexual orientation, witchcraft, and death as seen through the eyes of this plucky girl growing up in a haunted house in the 1960's. Charming, provocative, funny, and creepy as Hell, Night Birds will shake you up before leaving you all warm and fuzzy inside.
The suggestion approved by Shepherd.com, we received a template to fill out. It included questions about us, the novel, and what five books by other authors were our favorites that might fall within a similar category. We were asked to give that category a name that would become the title of our post. That title had to begin with “The best books…” The image below shows the title we chose and the five books we selected.
We were asked to write about our personal experience of reading those books. Here’s the one we wrote about The Body by Stephen King:
The Body is Gordie’s odyssey into imagination. As we would be inclined to do, he wants to see the dead boy out of morbid curiosity. He also wants to be the hero who found the body. The odyssey tests and reveals Gordie’s character and that of his three friends. As with the boys, we bear some lonely disappointments and pains. We’d be going to see the dead body merely so we could think to ourselves, at least that’s not me. Perhaps that’s what motivates them too. Who doesn’t do that? Yet their quest doesn’t lead only to an unknown dead boy, but to the dead boy in all of them, perhaps all of us. They are brought together as one by the experience and win the prize—they are alive.
This was a fun process for us and I would recommend it to other authors as a way to help audiences find books they like.
See our full post at Shepherd.com.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon