Annette Klause

I was born in Bristol, England, in 1953. I moved up to Newcastle upon-Tyne when I was seven, and it was there that I wrote several short books about cats, illustrated in clunky, blotchy felt pen. At the age of ten, I wrote my first horror book, The Blood Ridden Pool of Solen Goom. It had lots of pictures of blood and rocks. When I was fourteen, I read my first vampire book, which inspired me to write a heart-felt poetic epic, “The Saga of the Vampire”. (Spoiler—it was really bad.) When I was fifteen my family moved to the United States where I concentrated on writing soppy love poetry while attending a Washington DC high school. In college, my poetry wasn’t actually intended to be horror unless you count the reaction of my teachers. It wasn’t until I left the University of Maryland with a Masters in Library Science that I returned to writing fiction, but it was my poetry that was first published, in small magazines, although I try not to mention Cat’s Magazineto serious poets. Ten years of hard work later, my first young adult novel, The Silver Kiss (Delacorte, 1990; Dell, 1992), was published. Not that I’d advanced intellectually – I stole the idea from “The Saga of the Vampire”. (In 2001, Atheneum published a prequel short story to The Silver Kiss in the anthology The Color of Absence. The story is called “Summer of Love”. A couple of years ago, Random House published a new edition of The Silver Kiss which included that story and a new, sequel story called “The Christmas Cat”.) My second book, a children’s science fiction adventure called Alien Secrets (Delacorte, 1993; Dell, 1995) was a reaction to those years growing up when to read a sf book, an adolescent English girl had to turn herself into a thirty-year-old American man. I put the girl I wanted t see back then in my science fiction story. My horror story “The Hoppins” appeared in an anthology entitled Short Circuits (Delacorte, 1992; Dell, 1993); and another story called “The Bogey Man” was in Night Terrors edited by Lois Duncan (Simon & Schuster, 1996). In them, dreadful things happen to young people ( J ), so perhaps it is strange that I worked as a children’s librarian in Montgomery County, Maryland until I retired in 2015. Another book, Blood and Chocolate(Delacorte, 1997; Dell, 1999) is a passionate love story that just happens to feature lots and lots of werewolves, and was developed as a movie by MGM—the move was nothing like the book, sadly. My last novel was called Freaks: Alive, on the Inside! That one was published by Simon and Schuster. It is set in 1899 in the world of the travelling shows. It has a cast of thousands—none of them “normal”. My most recent published story is called “Elf Blood” and is in the anthology put out by Random House called Welcome to Borderland. The book is set in a shared world where multiple authors write stories about a place where magic and technology collide—and characters walk through one story into another. After I retired from my job as a children’s librarian, I thought I would write faster. Apparently, that’s not what happened. I write slower. But I haven’t stopped! Currently, I live with my husband and three cats in Hyattsville, Maryland and am trying to finish another book. Think sex, demons, and rock ‘n’ roll.