A fan called Mathias emailed me a while ago to say that he was about to start re-reading my Demonata series, but should he start with the first book -- Lord Loss -- and read them in the order published, or should he start with the story that is set the earliest -- Bec -- and read them in chronological order?

For those unfamiliar with The Demonata, it features three narrators, and the over-arcing storyline dances backwards and forwards in time between them, especially in the first half of the series. You certainly CAN read them chronologically -- starting with Bec, then Demon Thief, then Lord Loss, Slawter, Blood Beast and onwards -- but I think the story works best if you read them in the order I arranged the books. There's nothing random about the structure of The Demonata -- I planned it very carefully, even delicately, sometimes in ways that most readers probably didn't even consciously notice. (For instance, are you all aware that the order of the narrators is the same in reverse as it is going forward? That was to play on one of the themes from the series, that time can be circular.) For all the gore and action, it's an intricate puzzle box of a story, one that stretched me to the very limits of my story-telling abilities and took me quite a bit further beyond where I thought I could go.

So, yeah, by all means DO read the books chronologically if you wish, especially if you're re-reading them like Mathias and are curious to find out how the story plays out that way. But for the very BEST reading of the series... trust the writer!

If you don't own The Demonata, you can buy the full set of the UK paperback editions at an incredibly low bargain price over on Lowplex UK -- less than £20 for all ten books! They ship worldwide, and even with far-flung shipping costs included, they still work out at good value, no matter where you live. You can also get the set through Amazon stores and other places, so do look around for the very best deal you can find -- though Lowplex are usually very hard to beat, especially if you live in the UK or closeby. They have all my other series on sale too, at similarly giveaway prices.

I was very touched by this short article by Khadija Osman, a member of staff at the Round Table Books store in Brixton, London, talking about the impact that my character Debbie Hemlock had on her when she was a young girl.

I've always tried to write about different types of people in my books. It's not that I'm overly PC or trying to provide a wider appeal to boost sales -- it just seems like a natural thing to me as a writer, to try and observe and understand the world through the eyes and minds of others. A lot of my key characters ARE white and male, because I'm white and male, so it's obviously the perspective I most readily identify with. But I'm always wondering what life would be like if I was black or Asian or a girl or a woman or, or, or...

I can never truly know, of course -- well, unless reincarnation is a genuine thing and I've been those people before or will be them further down the line -- but that doesn't stop me wondering, and exploring those alternatives with my stories. I think it's a good thing for us humans to do, to put ourselves in the shoes of others, even if they're shoes that we can never actually fill. Bridges between us can only be built if we're willing to study the gaps between us from both sides.

"Who the hell is Pasta O'Malley?!?"

That was a question posed by a fan over on Twitter last month. The tweeter had re-read the series, spotted his name in the final book, and couldn't recall him ever being mentioned in it before. What was going on?!?

The answer was to be found on the Darren Shan Wiki page, which gave a full run-down on the two brief mentions of Pasta -- and I have to be totally honest here -- I had to look that up to find out! I'd completely forgotten about the character!!

To be fair to myself, Pasta in the books has the most fleeting of fleeting appearances. He's mentioned very briefly in book 8, but doesn't actually appear in it, and then is seen very briefly in book 12, but he's dead. Not much action for poor old Pasta, I'm afraid!!

I forget a lot about a book and a series when I move on, especially when a good chunk of time has passed, but when I'm creating, I'm fully immersed in that world, taking care to put a polish on even the finest of details -- which is how an obscure, minor character like Pasta, who was only name-checked once before, can pop up (albeit dead) in a crucial scene in the final book. I try to make the worlds of my books as real as possible, and in real life, not everyone is a star. We're surrounded in our day to day lives by Pasta O'Malleys, people with full and rich histories of their own, but who only briefly register in the stories of OUR lives -- just as we only briefly register in the stories of THEIR lives.

I've always liked books that give nice little moments to far-fringe characters -- David Eddings did it in his lovely Belgariad series, where a pair of guys are met fleetingly in one of the books, then turn up again unexpectedly in a tiny but poignant moment much later in the story line -- and that's why I try to include a few Pasta O'Malleys every now and again, along with the more memorable heroes and villains.

Sorry for forgetting about you, Pasta -- I'll try not to forget you again -- and I hope this post makes up for it!!!

TEAM KOLBE

The students at Team Kolbe House are studying Cirque Du Freak, and were challenged to come up with adverts for a vampire's assistant. You can see their wonderfully creative responses in the photo. This is a great example of how reading can be both fun AND educational. Inspiring teachers know that you can tease much more out of students if you find alternative ways for them to muse upon the text of their favourite books, rather than just making them write dull, straight essays about them. Bravo for the imaginative teaching vampire of Team Kolbe House!!

An Italian fan called Frankie is working their way through my Saga Of Darren Shan/Cirque Du Freak series, and writing a review of each one in turn. Frankie recently reviewed the 7th, Hunters Of The Dusk, and you can find the review by CLICKING HERE -- if you're not an Italian speaker, you can copy and paste the text into Google Translate or a simialr service for a very good translation. At one point in the review, Frankie noted:

"Arriving at the seventh book, one might think that there is nothing left to add to the story. Too bad it's not like that: for poor Darren the adventures (and troubles) never end."

I think this was a well-made and important point. I've never been interested in repeating a story pattern over the course of a long series. I don't find a winning formula and stick to it. I'm always keen to explore with my stories, to take them in unexpected directions, to surprise and disorient readers as I lead them down channels and side-roads that they weren't expecting. Thus a series like Cirque Du Freak can start out with three low-key, small-scale books, before expanding out to take in Vampire Mountain, the Lake of Souls, a full-on war, and everything else that I packed in. The twists and turns don't work for every reader -- I'm sure there are plenty of fans who wish I just stuck to whatever style of mine it is that they like best, whether that's the outright fantasy of The Thin Executioner or the full-blown horror of Lord Loss or the politically-driven Zom-B books -- but I think they've played a big part in making my books work for the majority of my readers who like story-telling on a vast and unpredecitable scale. You never know exactly what you're getting with a Darren Shan series -- even seven books in.

Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Only the readers can decide. But I'll tell you one thing for sure -- it's a Shan thing!!!

HABLA INGLES???

A Spanish reviewer recently reviewed the last three books of my Saga Of Darren Shan/Cirque Du Freak series, on the site El Club De Las Sebaduras. It wasn't an easy undertaking for the reviewer, because they had read the first nine books in Spanish, but my Spanish publishers stopped releasing the series at that point, which meant they had to look elsewhere -- I'm not sure if they read the books in English with the help of a translator, or if there are fan-translated versions of them online. Since I would have to report it if I found out it was the latter, I prefer to believe that it was the former!  Either way, you can read the review by CLICKING HERE and copying and pasting the text into Google Translate or a similar service -- but be warned, the review does contain some SPOILERS for the last few books.

CLASSICAL?!?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading teacher Jon Love's review of Cirque Du Freak, though I was surprised at first to see it mentioned as a "classic," as I normally associate that term with much older books that have been around for years and years. Then I remembered that this coming January will mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Cirque Du Freak, so, yeah, I guess the cap might just about be starting to fit. I suppose the next stage will be kids moaning about that "rubbish old book that's SO out of date!!"    To read the full review, CLICK HERE.

SPOT-ON!

CHECKMATE!

Checkmate! CLICK HERE for a nice, short promo video for Lord Loss, made by a fan called Brandon. Nothing fancy on the technical front, but it goes to show that sometimes simple can be very effective.

RAMPANEZE?!?

I had a trip down memory lane recently when shifting some papers around in my office. Pretty much all of the fan art that I feature on Facebook and my blog these days is sent to me electronically, but back in the old days it was mostly posted to me by fans (or given to me by them at signings and events). I used to keep those drawings in a folder (indeed, some old pieces are still inside it, waiting -- probably in vain, I'm afraid -- to be processed) until I had time to scan and upload them. If you're interested in checking out the old fan art (some dating back almost twenty years) it's still up on my site: CLICK HERE

Anyway, back to the point.

I hadn't looked at that art folder in ages, and it has become buried under a mound of other bits and pieces. A short while ago, I stumbled across it, and noted the two words written on the cover -- ART, whose meaning is obvious and, RAMPANEZE, which is more puzzling until the story behind it is explained.

Many moons ago, back when I was putting together my ideas for Tunnels of Blood (the third book of my Saga Of Darren Shan/Cirque Du Freak series), I had planned to feature an evil vampire in the story. But the world had seen more than its share of evil vampires, even by that stage, so I started to re-think my approach, and decided to come up with a breakaway group of vampires, with their own beliefs and customs. While these ideas were bubbling around in my head, one day I was making up stories to tell to a young cousin of mine called Kealan. I was always doing that for Kealan and his brothers (and later his sister), but on this day I decided to encourage him to use HIS imagination and tell a story to me. He came up with some weird kind of monster which he called a RAMPANEZE. I liked the sound of that and wrote it down on the folder which ended up being used for fan art, thinking it might be a good name for the breakaway gang of vampires that I was planning to write about. In the end I decided to tweak it slightly and replace the R with a V.

And thus were born the VAMPANEZE!

IT'S A WRAP!