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Guest post: Libraries, Research, and Horror Fiction by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

MonsterLibrarian.com is pleased to be a part of the blog tour for Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s new book, An Embarrassment of Riches. We asked Chelsea to tell us about her experiences with libraries and how she does the research for her books. What she shared with us here is really inspiring, and I’m excited about having the chance to read her book and tell you all about it later this month.  Thanks, Chelsea!

Libraries, Research, and Horror Fiction
by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

It has been said that to become a writer is to condemn yourself to a lifetime of homework, which is true as far as it goes, but not such an onerous burden to those of us who like homework.  Since I was a kid, I’ve collected books — I still do, and I have a pretty good research library in my basement which I use fairly often.  Most of my dictionaries are at my left shoulder in my office, and some basic texts on a wide variety of subjects — the history of weapon, ships, trade, fabric, clothes, shoes, food, travel, vehicles, architecture, horses, science, engineering, and art, to mention those I can see by turning my head — all very useful for a writer.

For the more specific questions, I have another pair of approach — the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and grad students.  The Cal libraries are a splendid source of all kinds of information.  As a trained cartographer, I’m particularly fond of the map room, and although there are a number of books of maps in my own library, Cal has a truly wonderful collection that I love to explore.  When I have a sense of a locale, I have a much better feel for the story that takes place in it, so what I gain from the map room I find invaluable.  The one thing I would advise anyone using the Bancroft Library, or any university library, to make a list of the subjects you intend to research, otherwise you’re apt to be overwhelmed by the volume of information available to you.

Now, about grad students: when I have a subject I need to research that is either controversial or about which there is relatively reliable information available, or for that matter, if I want to be able to ask questions, I contact a grad student in the field in which I’m researching, and take him or her to lunch, and encourage her or him to expound on the topic while I take notes and ask questions.  Once in a while, I’ll take two grad students to lunch and listen to them disagree, which I find a very useful tool in sorting out various thorny problems encountered in doing historical research as part of the preparation for writing novels.

When I was working on An Embarrassment of Riches, I had some doubts about a few of the historical sources I had used, and took a grad student to lunch, and asked him what he could tell me about the impact that Bohemia’s war with Hungary had on Queen Kunigunde’s Court — the Queen was the grand-daughter of King Bela of Hungary and the wife of King Otakar II of Bohemia.  It struck me that there might be various kinds of spying going on in such a Court, and if so, who was spying on whom?  I also had read up on trade in Bohemia, since at the time it was the richest kingdom in Europe; I could find relatively little information on what that did to trade.  In this case, it was two grad students, and they had a lively debate which ended up telling me a lot about the Guilds of Prague.  Not quite what I was after, but extremely useful, and it allowed me to put in a chapter about formal civic occasions.

Another advantage of living near a major university is that there are many people in the area who have extensive private libraries, and genuine expertise, who are willing to share their books and their knowledge with me.  This is an enjoyable side of research, since I get to meet many interesting people while garnering necessary information.  I usually find these people by asking some of my friends and neighbors if they know anyone with good information about — and then I fill in what I want to know.

Probably one of the most difficult things to find out in regard to history is what people wore when they were schlepping around the house, or to put it another way, the equivalent of jeans and a t-shirt.  Another tricky thing to find is what they ate for breakfast, meaning nothing fancy, just ordinary breakfast.  These two questions have taken up more of my time in more of my historical books than anything else, largely because people tend to record what is unusual, or out of the ordinary, not what they do every day.  But it is those ordinary things that let the fiction writer gain a feel for the time and its people, and it is usually those ordinary things that produce the telling details that bring the time into sharp relief.  This is one of the reasons I find household records from the period I’m researching so useful.  Legal codes are another good source of information, although their literary style tends to be arid at best.  One book I have that I often consult is on the history of weather in Europe from the time of Socrates to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which includes many contemporary accounts of crop yields and shifts in weather, both of which have at least as much impact as trade, disease, and wars.

See what I mean?  A lifetime of homework.  Bring it on.

Guest post: I Heart Libraries by Melissa de la Cruz

I Heart Libraries

by Melissa de la Cruz

What author does not love libraries? Being an author means that you are immediately drawn to them. I’ve noticed that many writers even include libraries in their books. One of my favorite fictional libraries is the one Ben Hanscom creates in Stephen King’s “IT”. Ben grows up to be an architect, and he bases a lot of his work on the beautiful building that was a safe haven for a “nerd” like him. That always stayed with me. When I was in Seattle recently, and visited the public library designed by Rem Koolhass, I thought immediately of Ben, Stephen King, and the library in that book, I thought, “I wonder if Rem had read that book and if he was thinking about it when he designed it.” It’s a wonderful library, gorgeous, light-filled, orderly, well-stocked. A reader’s dream.

I was the kid who spent her lunch hours at the library. When I was in elementary school, I read every book in our little library. Every. Single. One. When I was done I re-read them. When we moved to America, my dad took us to the library every week, and we would marvel at the wealth of this country – a public library! For everyone! What riches! (Only private schools had libraries in the Philippines when I was growing up. My dad used to joke that if there was a public library it would be empty in an hour. Everyone would borrow books and never return them.)

The library was the place where I discovered my favorite writers, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, JRR Tolkien. I never even owned a copy of the Vampire Chronicles until I was in my thirties and could afford the special edition hardcover one. It still saddens me that I couldn’t afford to own those books, it’s like a memory loss, not having them on my shelves. So I’m really grateful that I was able to read them in the library.

In college, I worked at several libraries, both of them inspired the Blue Bloods books. At Columbia I worked at the main library, at Butler, in the reference department. The Columbia library is one of the largest libraries in the world, and there are six million books in the stacks – in the basement – that aren’t even out in the lending shelves. If you want a copy of a book from the stacks, you have to request it, and one of the library workers like me, would take this rickety cage elevator (okay so maybe it was a normal elevator but it felt like a cage elevator) down into the deepest dungeons (I mean floors) of the library and retrieve it. It was kind of creepy and it freaked me out a little, being alone underground, hunting for books. It inspired the Blue Bloods’ Repository of History, and the core-scrapers, upside-down skyscrapers built underground. Then I worked at an Art History library, where I steamed blueprints and archival material. I spent a summer steaming Stanford White’s blueprints. Pretty cool. In my new book, Witches of East End, one of my characters is a librarian and an archivist. Libraries are in my blood, and in my books.

Monster Librarian note: Check out our review of Melissa de la Cruz’s latest Blue Bloods novella Bloody Valentine.

The Walking Dead and Your Zombie Collection

In case you might have missed it, zombies have been the monster du jour for the past several years. They have been shambling their way through horror movies, video games, books, and graphic novels. They have even can be found in other genres such as paranormal romance (who knew!). The TV station American Movie Classics (AMC) has brought the graphic novel The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman to the little screen. With high production values, the show has become popular. What does this mean for libraries? We here at Monster Librarian feel that the different media that horror that the genre is found in provides an excellent opportunity to promote leisure reading by tying books to other media, like tv shows, movies, and video games, being promoted in mass media. There have been a plethora of zombie titles that have come out in the past few years, and this is a great time to put some on display!

Some notable titles we suggest for library collections:

Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead edited by John Skipp

Dying to Live and Dying to Live: Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth

Dead Sea by Brian Keene

Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne

World War Z; An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brook

Bits of the Dead by Keith Gouveia

History is Dead by Kim Paffenroth

The World is Dead edited by Kim Paffernoth

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks

Happy reading!