Contest and Promo for Into the Darkness

Anna here~ I remember being a young girl, no older than 12 or 13, reading the V.C. Andrews classic, Flowers in the Attic, that horrific tale of small children locked in a room by their own mother, and what strikes me even now is the stark, raw emotions conveyed on each page. I cried for these characters, and I loved with them too. My mother bought me a complete set and I devoured them all, loving each one more then the last. Then I moved on to the Casteel series, and My Sweet Audrina. You could almost say that I grew up with these books. Admittedly, I didn't keep up with all the titles released, and I think my next big book crushes came with Kathleen Woodwiss and Lavyrle Spencer, deeper romances that were more complex, and adult. Then of course, my beloved, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and the sweeping adventures of Saint-Germain, which remains my favorite vampire romance of all time. 

But, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for V.C. Andrews and I'm thrilled to offer my blogging friends a chance to read Into the Darkness. Just leave a comment with your first romance title, your favorite V.C. Andrews book, or you could even let me know what you think of posthumously published books.

Bestselling author V.C. Andrews portrays her most romantic couple since Troy and Heaven in the Casteel series…in this twisting tale of desire and obsession, reality and dreams.

As lovely as one of the precious gems at her parents’ jewelry store, Amber Taylor is shy and introspective—qualities misread by others as being stuck-up and superior. Facing a long, lonely summer working at the family shop, Amber’s world lights up when the Matthews family suddenly moves into the house next door, a property that has stood neglected for the longest time. And when she meets Brayden Matthews, an only child just like her, Amber soon becomes infatuated with this handsome, quirky young man who seems to know her innermost feelings almost before she does, who takes her places she never knew existed in her small town. Their connection is electrifying, unlike anything Amber’s felt before. But as quickly as he appears, Brayden vanishes into the darkness. And finding out the truth about him will push Amber Taylor to the edge of madness….

An atmospheric journey of passion and suspense that builds to a jolting, unforgettable finale, Into the Darkness showcases V.C. Andrews at her best.

Become a Fan http://www.facebook.com/OfficialVCAndrews

Leave a comment for your chance to win! Open to US only. Good luck!

Required reading?

I stole a few moments on the computer to browse through my Google reader to see what's happening around the book world and came across a post at The Book Lady's Blog about the fantastical idea of required reading on a global scale. Interesting premise and worthy of discussion, at least I think so, because the goal would be to change the world, and not in a Mojojojo evil mastermind kind of way.

So it made me think, so scary when I am sleep deprived, about what single paranormal title would I deem required reading. Not to change the world or anything, but maybe to entice a reader to the genre. Would I choose Urban Fantasy? Horror? Or Romance? How would I ever be able to choose just one? I was going to narrow my initial search just to books I read in the last year, since it's well after midnight and I really do need to sleep someday, but I can't. Maybe because the books are too fresh in my mind or because last year really had some amazing titles (The President's Vampire, Kill the Dead, Hard Spell, Den of Thieves, Dead Mann Walking, Snuff~just to name a few). 

So I changed my tactics to a book that has sentimental value for me and immediately came up with an answer...

Hotel Transylvania by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro!! This was the book that started it all for me. My mother gave me a copy almost 25 years ago and I can still read it on that same emotional level to this day, and I do quite often. Yarbro's novels offer so much more than a romance because each book provides a detailed history of times gone past, so vivid that you become part of it. Saint Germain struggles to find his place in the world, much like we do in our own time. The books touch you on an intellectual level as well as on the romantic level, and I will always have a special place in my heart for the relationship between Madelaine and Le Comte Saint Germain. I love the entire series!

So tell me, what would your one paranormal book be? Leave a comment and you might just win a new book for your trouble. I've been cleaning the office area and the book box is plenty full.

Spooktacular Sunday: Monet's Ghost by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Book Description:

Geena Howe loves art and is thrilled to find that she has the ability to literally project herself into paintings. She can even travel to places beyond what is depicted on the canvas, but can only come back at the spot where she came in. When Geena enters one of Monet's water lily paintings, she realizes that the moat with the water lilies where she came into the painting is gone, trapping her.

Review:

Geena Howe has just found out that she can make herself go into paintings. Meaning, she can stand in front of the paintings at the art gallery and will herself to be in them. While inside them she can walk around and see what is happening in the world of the painting.  

She really liked Claude Monet, so one day she decided to go into the Water Lilies painting. What she experiences inside this painting is very different from the other paintings she has "visited". She gets stuck in this painting! When she first goes in she notices a castle and heads toward it. Here she finds Crispin and his aunt who inform her about the castle being haunted by a ghost that likes to change things. She does not believe them until things around her begin to change. The scariest change for her is when the moat that she used to get into the painting disappears and she is stuck in the painting world. 

Her and Crispin set off on an adventure to find the ghost and get him to put the painting back to normal so that she can return home. This takes them on many wild adventures, like almost being erased, their clothes and appearance changing at the whim of the ghost, and most of all, going into the maze that she cannot find her way out of and meeting a centaur.   

*Spoiler Alert* At the end Geena meets the ghost who happens to be the painter Claude Monet! But she still has to convince him to repaint the moat so she can return to her time, and then figure out how to get home.

This book would be great for any upper elementary school or early junior high school reader.  It was full of adventure and narrow escapes. It had a lot of character and you never knew where it was going to take Geena next. I really liked how the story was presented as a ghost that was changing things inside the painting, and that the characters in the painting had no idea they were not real and existed only inside the art. It was interesting when Genna met Monet because you found out that the people and places in his artwork were inspired by people and places from long ago. Great book!

*Reviewed by Jenny O.

*This book belongs to me and we chose to review for fun.

*Anna here~ I was thrilled beyond reason when I discovered that one of my all time favorite authors wrote a book aimed at a younger audience. This meant that I could introduce my children to her writing that much sooner! I thought this concept was wonderful, rather like Magic Tree House books, and loved the combination of mystery and art. Definitely a keeper! I'm putting this copy right next to all my Saint Germain books!

If you are interested in a copy then you might have to cruise around your local library because I could only find copies on Ebay.

The Dracula Event: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

What a treat today!  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro talks about rediscovering Dracula.  Without further ado...

On (Re)Discovering Dracula

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro 

The first time I read Dracula, I was fourteen, in the 8th grade, and it was almost May,1957, providentially the same month that the novel begins.  Like most of my classmates, I had an impression of the book that came almost entirely from film — not that kids my age were encouraged to see horror films — and from comic books.  Since I already had ventured into 19th century fiction well beyond Dickens (whose work I dislike to this day; I’ll be happy to tell you why another time) to such writers as Wilkie Collins and non-Holmsian Conan Doyle, I was somewhat familiar with the storytelling techniques of the period.

      I found the scene-setting less purple than many of the far-away-places descriptions in other novels of the period, which interested me, since the setting really was a far-away place.  Being the daughter of a cartographer, I soon looked up Transylvania in the atlas and began to check out the places mentioned as they occurred in the book:  Bistritz, Varna, and Whitby for that matter.  It made the book more plausible to me, and more engaging.  I read the whole of it in just under three weeks, and prepared a book report on it — the last one for the semester, which shocked my English teacher, Mister Dunkel, who up until then, approved heartily of all my reading habits.  He thought the book was sensationalistic — which, of course, it was — and I think, in retrospect, the sexuality of the story troubled him, as it has so many others.  For the first and only time in his class, I got a B on a book report, more for the subject than my writing.  As I recall, I spent most of the report talking about the idea of a monster that doesn’t look like one, or generally behave like one, until you get to know him.  I had also been struck with Dracula’s remark that “time is on my side”, and although I understood it in context, I wondered if that was really true, considering how much you would lose as part of extreme longevity, a theme that has not only remained with me in my own work, but is a central aspect of Saint-Germain’s character.  So that first reading did start me thinking along what is now an obvious track.

      I came back to Dracula when I was 19, taking a course in Culture and Folklore as part of my social sciences requirements at college.  We had spent time on the more familiar archetypes of all cultures — gods, devils, angels, demons, vampires, werebeings, shape-changers (weres and shape-changers are not the same thing: werebeings are compelled to change by factors beyond their control; shape-changers control their transformations), tricksters, magicians, and dangerous females.  Having loaded up on vampire lore, I came back to Stoker and did a paper on what he had done with the archetype in the novel.  By then I knew more about Stoker himself, and had read some of his other work.  As a Theatre Arts and Music major, I was keenly aware of the theatricality of the book the second time through, and saw that Dracula, as a character, mirrored some of Sir Henry Irving’s performance as Mephistopheles in Faust; I commented on the blending of the vampire and the devil archetypes in Stoker, and tried to discuss what it is about the vampire that is so fascinating.  On that I didn’t get very far, but I knew the whole sex-and-death thing was an intrinsic part of it, and that the combination of a figure of great power who is nonetheless almost totally dependent on ordinary mortals for survival had all kinds of ambiguity about it, ambiguity that contributed to the enthralling force of the figure.  That paper got an A-, along with the note “good save”, which still puzzles me.

      I read Dracula again when I was 24 or 25 and had decided to switch from writing plays to writing stories, this time to see how Stoker had put it all together.  I hadn’t yet decided I would work on the vampire — or if I had, I wasn’t aware of it — but going through Dracula this time, I put most of my focus on the other characters, and did my best to figure out how the interactions of the various ordinary mortals evoked the differentness of Dracula, and what that differentness was comprised of, beyond the traditional folkloric vampire.  I also spent more time examining the personalities of Lucy and Mina, since they are the characters who interact most closely with Dracula in the story.

      When I began work on Hotel Transylvania  in the fall of 1971, along with my review of vampire folklore throughout the world, I had another look at Dracula as the ne plus ultra literary model, and the image I planned to work against by pushing my vampire as far to the positive as possible and still remain a vampire, an idea I’m still exploring.  A few years later I began work on an opera based on Dracula, which I continue to work at in fits and starts, which meant another read-through of the book looking for the crucial dramatic turning points in the story and adapting them to my purposes.  Then, quite deliberately, I put Dracula aside and didn’t look at it again until I was asked to do the ill-fated Dracula’s Brides trilogy, at which time I spent a fair amount of time looking at those parts of the book in which the three women appeared, and once again I put the book aside.
      Yet it seems I can’t get away from Dracula, because at present I’m involved in another Dracula-related project.  There is something about that figure that continues to haunt me, and, I suspect, most writers engaged in writing in the vampire sub-genre.  Stoker certainly struck a nerve — or a vein — when he came up with that character, and all of us who pursue the modern versions of the archetype owe him a debt of gratitude for creating such a durable figure and so broad an audience.