Nancy Holder

Exclusive Interview: AUTHOR NANCY HOLDER GETS POSSESSED BY ’POSSESSIONS’

The best-selling author of BUFFY books and co-author of the WICKED series talks about her newest novel

Nancy Holder has an enormous catalogue of writing credits. With co-writer Debbie Viguie, Holder has hit the New York Times best-seller list with the young adult horror WICKED series, which has just been optioned by DreamWorks. Holder is also the author of many BUFFY novels and she’s one of the writers in the just-published HELLBOUND HEARTS anthology of original stories inspired by Clive Barker’s HELLRAISER. Holder’s newest young adult horror novel, POSSESSIONS, has just been published. She gives us an exclusive look at the book and her thoughts on writing horror. iF: What is POSSESSIONS about?

NANCY HOLDER: POSSESSIONS is a young adult horror novel about a girl who goes to an isolated, very upscale boarding school in the mountains of Northern California, and she discovers that it’s haunted and that the mean girls are not just mean, they are very, very evil.

iF: Are they in fact possessed?

HOLDER: Well, it’s on the back of the cover, so I suppose I can say "yes." There’s gossip that school is haunted, and there’s gossip that our heroine lives at the second most haunted dorm, and this seems to be proven out during the book as she walks down the corridors and sees faces in the mirrors and sees statues that move and she quickly finds out that there’s a whole other agenda going on with the popular girls and the mean and very cruel pranks that they play on the other girls.

iF: What was the inspiration for this book? Was it remembering being at school and thinking, ‘These kids are so awful, they might as well be demonically possessed’ or did you think ‘POSSESSIONS is a good title and what would be a good story to go with it?’

HOLDER: My favorite movie of all time was [the 1963 film adaptation of] THE HAUNTING. I loved that you could read more than one version of what was going on into the story and while my young adult book is more overt, I love that understated sense of horror where things weren’t always jumping out at you and there weren’t a lot of gory special effects, it was just very creepy. I have loved that kind of horror since then. I love a lot of Asian horror, I loved the original Japanese version of THE RING, I love the American RING, too – I love that not everything was explained, although I’ll say that in POSSESSIONS, I try much harder to make things more clear for my audience, but I love that sense of freedom to just be scared and freedom to scare people that I saw in THE HAUNTING and Asian horror. That was probably my basic, fundamental desire, to create in a reader the kind of horror I felt, the kind of unease I felt, watching THE HAUNTING and Asian horror movies, and to transfer that onto the printed page. I have written a lot of adult horror. The very first book I ever sold was an adult novel. I admire kids, I like kids – I used to be a Girl Scout leader. I just very comfortable growing up with them.

iF: Does being the mother of a teenaged daughter help you write these young adult books?

HOLDER: Definitely. I’ve always felt that adults have the exact same fears and anxieties and hopes that young adults confess to having that adults have learned to rationalize and cover up more. I do think that young adults wear their hearts on their sleeves more than adults do and I think they’re a lot savvier than most people give them credit for. So I really like writing for young adults, and my daughter does, too. She quickly sussed out what she’s supposed to read, versus what she likes.

iF: What age group is POSSESSIONS for?

HOLDER: I’d say fourteen and up, maybe somebody who’s thirteen and who’s ready to be scared.

iF: What is the difference between writing for young adults and writing for adults?

HOLDER: I think when one is writing young adult that the characters are a bit younger and they’re more willing to admit how it seems that everything revolves around whatever they’re interested in. So if they like a guy, they really, really, really like this guy. If they want something fixed, they really, really, really want it fixed. Whereas adults can sort of multi-task their emotions and spread them out more, I think young adults feel everything extremely intensely and then move on, and adults spread it around more.

iF: Does that apply to their reactions to horror as well?

HOLDER: Yeah. I think that one of the things adult horror fans are looking for is to recapture that incredible sense of being scared that they felt when they were younger. Like when they read Stephen King for the first time or read R.L. Stine for the first time and were really taken by it. I think that’s why gory horror got popular, because it was shocking, and people could be kind of knocked out of their comfort level by it. I don’t know if gory horror for gory horror’s sake is why it became so popular, or if it was so novel that that was its appeal – it was something new and different, they’re feeling things for the first time. In a lot of horror that I write, I assume that my reader will have known about something, and then I realize, "No, I’m writing for young adults – they won’t know about this, it won’t be clichéd to them to hear about the Titanic or hear about Roanoke or hear about the Bermuda Triangle. They haven’t watched all the movies I have and they haven’t read all the books that I have, so they’re coming to it fresher." And I really enjoy that, because I feel like it’s easier to connect in that way with them. They’re not as jaded.

iF: Was POSSESSIONS written with an eye towards possibly making it a series of novels?

HOLDER: I’ve sold three more. The second book is called POSSESSIONS: THE EVIL WITHIN and it will be out in June.

iF: Is that with the same characters, or just with the same school?

HOLDER: The same characters. There’s a big cliff-hanger at the end of Book One, the majority of which will be resolved in Book Two.

iF: Does POSSESSIONS have a story that will arc over the four books?

HOLDER: Yes. There is a major arc over the four books. If you didn’t read One, you can start with Two and it will still work for you. We did that on purpose, my editor and I, but there are some overriding mysteries. In each book, the smaller issue or crisis is addressed, but there is an over-arching [question of], what the heck is going on in Marlwood?

iF: When would you say the resurgence in young adult horror occurred? Did you notice a particular tipping point in recent years?

HOLDER: I think that the original wave of what is now young adult horror started with R. L. Stine’s GOOSEBUMPS, and I think those readers got older and I think they moved to HARRY POTTER. Although I wouldn’t classify it as horror, it’s still creepy and eerie. And then they started maturing and a lot of those readers started reading TWILIGHT and I think that whole kind of creepy supernatural otherness really exploded right around TWILIGHT. HARRY POTTER really paved the way and those readers got older and then they needed something to read. I’m aware that people of all ages read HARRY POTTER and TWILIGHT, but that young adult dark fantasy/horror market, as we have it right now, started with those: first R.L. Stine, then HARRY POTTER and then TWILIGHT.

iF: What else are you working on now?

HOLDER: I’m very excited that [Holder’s WICKED co-writer] Debbie Viguie and I have a spin-off from our WICKED series called CRUSADE. It’s about vampire hunters.

iF: Do you know why you are so fond of the horror genre?

HOLDER: I don’t know. I would like to have a cogent response for you – it’s just something that I’m very drawn to and always have been. I got a wig one year for Halloween, it was supposed to be for a Native American costume, but all I could think about was that it would make a great horror movie. I wrote two movie screenplays about the wig – I was about nine. And that’s the way I’ve been wired my whole life.