Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory Published by Macmillan on March 24th 2015
Genres: Contemporary, Fantasy, Fiction, General
Pages: 320
Goodreads
From award winning author Daryl Gregory comes a thrilling and colorful Lovecraftian adventure of a teenage boy searching for his mother, and the macabre creatures he encounters.
Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who’s been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the “sensitives” who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.
On Harrison’s first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knifewielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, audiobook
Find it: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads
About Daryl:
Daryl Gregory is an award-winning writer of genre-mixing novels, stories, and comics. His most recent work is the novel is Afterparty (Tor, April 2014) and the novella We Are All Completely Fine (Tachyon, August 2014). His first novel, Pandemonium, won the Crawford Award and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His other novels include the Philip K. Dick award finalist The Devil’s Alphabet and Raising Stony Mayhall, which was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal.
Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, which was named one of the best books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly. His comics work includes the Planet of the Apes series, and Dracula: The Company of Monsters series (co-written with Kurt Busiek). He lives in State College, PA, where he writes programming code in the morning, prose in the afternoons, and comics at night.
PLEASE WELCOME DARYL TO BOOKHOUNDS YA
Quite possibly the best answers to my weird questions EVER!
- What is on your nightstand?
A lamp, and thirty-two books, stacked high. I fully expect to die by book avalanche. But at least they’ll be able to use the lamp to find me.
- Is there a big difference writing for a graphic novel than a regular one?
If you’re not an artist, graphic novels are tremendously easier! And I’m definitely not an artist. Eighty percent of the work in a comic is the art, and eighty-percent of the emotional effect and 67.9% of the story information is through the art. (These numbers are scientific facts that I just made up.) Your main job is to structure the story in your head, and then write as little as possible — providing only what’s not going to be already present in the comic panels. In my comic work, I’ve been very lucky to work with some fantastic artists.
But a prose novel — everything’s on the writer. It’s a lot more work, but all the blame and the glory go to you. I enjoy that. But sometimes I miss the collaboration you get with comics.
I’ve recently experimented with a third storytelling medium — Twine games. These are choose-your-own-adventure-style games that run in your browser. I recently collaborated with a visual artist, David Hinnergardt, to do a companion game for Harrison Squared called Harrison Squared Dies Early. David did a series of very weird paintings, and I wrote an adventure around them. You can find it at darylgregory.com/harrisonsquared. It’s free!
- Do you have any super powers? Any that you would like to own?
When I was a kid, I wanted to be like the hero of Harrison Squared: smart, brave, witty, and capable of doing battle with interdimensional monsters. I also desperately wanted to be able to teleport like Nightcrawler.
Today, my sole super power is that I can drink coffee right up until I go to bed, and sometimes after. You could hook me up to an I.V. drip of Sumatra Dark Roast and I would sleep like a baby.
- What are you reading right now?
I’m in the middle of writing a novel, so that means I’m reading non-fiction that will feed the book. The novel is about con men, card sharps, and a family of psychics, and I’ve got several research books going in different rooms of the house. The book that’s physically closest to me as I type this is Practical Mental Magic, a classic magic book by Theodore Annemann. So when I finish this novel, I’ll also be able to astonish my friends and confuse my enemies!
- Do you miss teaching?
I taught English and speech at a small high school in Michigan, and it was one of the most frustrating and rewarding three years of my life. I don’t miss the endless hours of prep and grading—which made it near-impossible to get any fiction writing done—and I don’t miss dealing with administration and the school bureaucracy. But working with students in the classroom was enormously fun and challenging. As a new teacher, I had to be on my game every day. Teaching is performance, and the show had to go on, every day, hour after hour. I’ve never had a job like that since. These days I get to teach writing occasionally, mostly to new writers or college students, and it scratches that itch.
This sounds like a really interesting book, with plot twists galore, I’m sure. I wonder, then, if he finds his father, too? I guess I’ll have to read it and see!
sounds like a really good book!
OMG seriously–Planet of the Apes–if i hadn’t already had this on my wishlist the POA would have had me rushing to add it,