Favorite Childhood Memories or Vacation You
Have Ever Taken – Stefan Bachmann
I traveled a lot as a
kid. I grew up in Switzerland, where many cool cities are only a short flight
or a few hours away by train. I remember wandering through the Tower of London
and tracing the 300-year-old messages scratched into the walls of the prison
cells, being bored in the Hermitage in Moscow even though there was a Vermeer
RIGHT THERE, spending two weeks in Rome eating unhealthy amounts of gelato and
staring askance at headless marble statues. It was great, and I appreciate
those experiences so, so much now, even if I didn’t realize how cool they were
while I was doing them.
One of the earliest
trips that I actually remember is a lengthy visit to Rome when I was ten.
There’s a brief reference to Rome in A
Drop of Night, where our MC Anouk recalls walking through the Sistine Chapel,
“tipping my head back and feeling like all those bodies on the ceiling were
watching me . . .” Which is exactly how ten-year-old me felt. I didn’t realize
this at the time, but paintings from that era are stylized and the poses are
heightened, and basically they’re tailor-made to be as dramatic as possible. As
a kid I thought they were the creepiest.
This is kid-me climbing
the stairs that go up through the dome of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. LOOK AT
THOSE CLOTHES. Ah, 2004.
A Drop of Night is set in France, and I hadn’t actually been
to France in years before writing this book. I have vague memories of visiting Paris
for the wedding of an aunt, but that’s about it. I went to Versailles for the
first time right after finishing the first draft of ADoN and had to catch up on
quite a few things.
The Palais du Papillon
is modeled after Versailles, only underground; built to shelter aristocrats
from the French Revolution, but hiding quite a few dark secrets. The windows
are mirrored and there are all sorts of other, worse differences, but in
general it’s Versailles. Visiting the palace was fascinating. It’s an entire city
all under one roof, and I spent a lot of time looking at the door-locks, because
how *would* one secure a door with a fire poker if one were being chased
by something awful?
ABOUT A DROP OF NIGHT:
Seventeen-year-old
Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she's been
selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help
with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet
below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780's to hide an aristocratic
family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain
hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted
teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.Or so she thought.
But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .
A genre-bending thriller from Stefan Bachmann for fans of The Maze Runner and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.
You cannot escape the palace.
You cannot guess its secrets.
LINKS: Goodreads | Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | iBooks | The Book Depository
ABOUT STEFAN BACHMANN:
Stefan
Bachmann was born in Colorado and spent of most of his childhood in
Switzerland, where he's now a student of music at the Zürich University
of Arts.His debut, gothic-faery-fantasy THE PECULIAR, was a New York Times Editor's Choice and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, and was translated into eight languages. Its companion, THE WHATNOT, was released on September 24th, 2013.
THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: 36 TALES BRIEF AND SINISTER, a collection of scary stories he wrote together with authors Emma Trevayne, Claire Legrand and Katherine Catmull, was released May 27th, 2014, from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.
His next book, YA thriller A DROP OF NIGHT, about a group of American teens fighting to survive after they become trapped in an underground Versailles, will be out March 15th, 2016, also from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.
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