Special Visit By Creator Of The Overland Chronicles—

Children’s Author Shared ‘Gross And Fun’ Facts Behind Her Chronicles

By Kendra Bobowick

Revealing her attraction for the gruesome habits of rats as they skitter along street corners and the cockroaches that carry on their apparently indestructible existence in the shadows, local children’s author Suzanne Collins recently offered a slideshow to residents gathered at C.H. Booth Library. She spoke about her fascination with “fun and gross animal facts” as an inspiration for her writing.

“Did you know that a cockroach can live for days without its head,” she asked as the many children in the audience groaned, several gripping one of her Underland Chronicles books, which begins with Gregor the Overlander. Bats and rats, along with their intriguingly gross facts become exaggerated animations in her series about a young man compelled toward a darker version of an Alice in Wonderland scenario. He is enmeshed in trials and frights taking place in the catacomblike underground of New York City.

Ms Collins admitted that the fairy tale had provoked her imagination, which she reclothed in a grimmer, subterranean fashion as she crafted her Underland series. Even her character, Gregor, has roots in macabre tales such as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, where a young man awakes one morning to find he has transformed into a dung beetle during the night.

With her son and daughter in mind, combined with the prospects of a new and unusual world such as the land where Alice finds herself, Ms Collins began to nurture the beginnings of her own storyline and traded Alice’s Wonderland for Gregor’s Underland. Embellishing her imaginings were thoughts about how her children would handle a different world if they fell into a rabbit hole or an open manhole on a city street.

“So in the book, the children fall into a hole in New York City ... I took city animals into this Underland,” she said. The rats and bats were huge, however. Ms Collins developed a series with Gregor making his way through the Underworld in different tales including Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, Gregor the Overlander and Gregor and the Marks of Secret. As the series continues Gregor learns more detailed clues about the Underworld and his own existence.

The next installment in the series, Gregor and the Code of Claw, is slated to be published in May 2007.

Teasing the young audience and room full of fans with an excerpt from her fifth book, Ms Collins first offered a prelude to explain that Gregor was reading some recently discovered inscriptions that held clues to his life and the story of the Underworld.

 “It is now, or it is never, break the code or die forever. Princess is the key to unlock treachery, what she it was the flaw in the code of claw,” read the author.

Tugging their minds in another direction before signing copies of her books, Ms Collins next offered a writing tip to listeners. She explained that often people give the advice of writing about “what you know,” she explained. Admitting “it’s great advice,” she added, “Write about something you like; it will be so much more exciting for you and for your readers.”