I attended the International Literature Festival Dublin this weekend. I went to two presentations, the first was with Jonathan Stroud, the author of Lockwood and Co. The second presentation was a panel discussion on horror with Dave Rudden (The Knights of the Borrowed Dark) and Cynthia Murphy (The Midnight Game).

Both were really cool, funny, and engaging. Here are a few things that they discussed. 

Dave explained the writing a trilogy by using the analogy of a house. The first book is the building of the house, the foundation, the rooms and everything else. In the second book you keep the house as it is but you find secret passageways and rooms. In the third book you burn down the house. This made me laugh, mostly because of how accurate it is. I was also super impressed that when reading from The Knights Of The Borrowed Dark, he didn’t look at the book once and had the whole section memorized.

Cynthia talked about some of her inspiration for her books and one of them was the point horror books. I know nothing about these books but she described some of the stories and they sounded really funny. I especially liked the one she talked about where someone was killed with a block of cheese.

I found it very interesting when Cynthia discussed why she never showed the Midnight Man in The Midnight Game. She said that she finds monsters scarier when she can’t see them and I could not agree with that more.

Jonathan talked about how his book Lockwood and Co was turned into a series on Netflix.

I thought it was interesting when he told us about the board games he created as a kid. He also wrote books where the reader had to roll a die to progress the story, kind of like a choose your own adventure book, but without choice. 

I also really liked seeing all of the different covers of his books from around and how different people thought the book should look like. My favorites were the American version of Lockwood and Co and the German Bartimaeus cover.