TeenBookCon: With so much different and sometime conflicting vampire lore out there, how did you decide what vampire elements worked and what didn't for your latest novel, Throat?
R. A. Nelson: I wanted to start at a kind of “vampire ground zero” with Throat. I had never expected to write a vampire book, and I wanted my approach to be as fresh as possible. All I knew about vampires came from movies and the one vampire novel I had read, Dracula, at about the age of thirteen. I wanted to make Throat the most realistic book I could, so I never considered allowing my vampires to change into bats or wolves, and I did my best to give a scientific foundation for the “disease” of vampirism. It was important that they still had a thirst for blood (otherwise, wouldn’t they be something else?) and I liked the idea that they had to avoid sunlight, which I later tied in with the science of solar flares. My characters needed super powerful senses, strength, speed, and I pretty much ignored anything beyond those core traits. Garlic? Nope. Crosses and holy water? Naw. With my main character, Emma, I pared back these “qualities” even further – because of her epilepsy, she is turned into a vampire who doesn’t fear the sun and doesn’t even need to drink blood. So she is something else. Something different from all the others who want to kill her.
TBC: How much of the NASA facility in Throat is based on the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama?
RAN: It’s a pretty realistic depiction of the Space Center. I’ve worked out there for a good number of years and in fact grew up roaming around the NASA facilities when my dad worked on the Apollo moon program and Skylab. So I know the place very well. I could walk you around just about all of the facilities described in the book. It’s a special place and NASA is close to my own center.
TBC: What are your top three "Books to have if stranded on a desert island"?
RAN: This is an extremely tough question, but a good one! It’s tough because there are so many wonderful books I would love to have with me in such a situation. But if I only had three, the danger would be driving myself crazy reading the same stories over and over. So my choices would have to be incredibly rich. My first inclination is to choose Emily Dickinson’s collected poems. Most of her poems are really short, but she packs so much brilliance into her lines that I could see myself reading them over and over and still managing to get something new out of them every time. In fact, I might choose for my second book another volume of poetry, the fattest, most varied collection I could find, everybody from Anne Sexton to Dylan Thomas to Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Wordsworth, Whitman, Donne, Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Does a book like that even exist? (Throw in the best of Dr. Seuss and I am sold). But I would love it for all the different flavors of voices. Okay, for the third book….hmmmm…the collected works of Cormac McCarthy? Hemingway? Twain? Maybe The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson? The House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski? The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean? If I were hungry for crazy ideas I would probably choose Philip K. Dick. See what I mean? I’d love to tell you I would tackle a gigantic and timeless doorstop of a book like Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust…but I have a sneaking suspicion I would be bored out of my skull. This might come down to throwing darts…
TBC: Great answer! Do you have any upcoming book projects you can tell us about?
RAN: Well, don’t want to spill too many secrets just yet, but yes, I’m working on something completely new and crazily different. A book like nothing anyone has ever seen before. So far out of left field, readers just might read the whole book open-mouthed and round-eyed. (Ha, a guy can dream, right?). The working title is BEYOND WHERE I CAN SEE.
TBC: Intriguing! Can’t wait to read it! Well, R. A., thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us and let our teens get to know you more before getting a chance to meet you at TeenBookCon!
R. A. Nelson is the author of Teach Me, Breathe My Name, Days of Little Texas, and Throat. Find him on Twitter.
R. A. will be speaking on the Guys Write Great Stuff panel with Brent Crawford, Blake Nelson, and Brian Yansky.
Alief Taylor High School is the place to be next Saturday, April 9th to see R. A. Nelson and others @ TeenBookCon! See you then...
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