54 To Be More Like Them & Edo van Belkom

Edo van Belkom shares his original YA horror story, followed by a candid and entertaining chat. They picked on the wrong kid… It’s not her face that’s scary. Plus, learn how Edo drove (literally) to writing success and a full-time career. And… why he chooses to hold down another job. We start this episode with a reading of “To Be More Like Them” performed by Karen Shute, one of our voice actor regulars. This short can be found in Death Drives A Semi.Then Edo van Belkom regals us with career anecdotes and writing advice. Edo’s first short story was reprinted in Year’s Best Horror Stories 20, launching a career that has produced over 200 stories and won both Bram Stoker and Aurora awards. He’s written more than a dozen novels including SCREAM QUEEN, BLOOD ROAD, MARTYRS and TEETH, plus a 15-year serial for Truck News Magazine following Mark Dalton, a former detective turned truck driver. His work spans horror, action-adventure novels for Harlequin’s Deathlands series, erotica, and three books on writing craft (Writing Horror, Writing Erotica, and Northern Dreamers). His Silver Birch Award-winning YA novel WOLF PACK inspired the 2023 Paramount+ series created by Jeff Davis and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.Find Edo at https://www.facebook.com/edo.vanbelkomPack a lunch, climb on the school bus, and hang on tight. It’s time for a ride…If you enjoy these interviews, help me keep making them! Join the next tier. Kind of like one Starbuck’s coffee a month.AF: Listeners just heard your story “To Be More Like Them,” which is creepy and disturbing. Can you tell me the inspiration behind it?EVB: I convinced the publishers of the Wolf Pack books to let me do anthologies for young adults. The first one was Be Afraid, and my whole idea was to have teenage problem stories with a horror bent. I had no experience doing YA back then—my job was to sell books and get work, so I bullshitted all the time about my experience and abilities. I put out the call for problem stories with a fantastic twist, and I had to write one myself. At the time I was working part-time as a school bus driver. I’d go out in the morning for an hour and a half, then have a six-hour block in the middle of the day to write, then do the run at the end of the day. It was a great job—stress-free because when you parked the bus at the end of the day, you didn’t have to worry about that job anymore until the next day.AF: And the school bus kids inspired the story?EVB: When I was driving the school bus with these private school kids—who were supposed to be better and everything—they were absolutely vicious. If anyone showed a sign of weakness, they jumped on that person in a group. That’s all in the story, that whole experience. There’s nothing more cruel than a bunch of kids finding the weak one in the pack and just tearing them to shreds. The ending, which I’m very proud of, came from reading a similar ending somewhere. I often do that—I read a lot of stories and think, “Ah, that’s how you end this kind of story.” I said I didn’t know anything about young adult books, but that book was a Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year finalist and also won a Children’s Book Center Our Choice Award.AF: So this story was truly the inspiration for Wolf Pack?EVB: I have to give credit to my wife, who at the time was working as a children’s librarian. She was always saying I should do young adult. The adult career kind of stalled with my mass market paperbacks Scream Queen and Blood Road—whether they didn’t make it into stores or wasn’t the right time, sales decided maybe it wasn’t for me. So I moved on to young adult. The idea stemmed from Be Afraid—what if a forest ranger finds wolf cubs after a fire and brings them home, but realizes they’re werewolves, part human? I pitched it over the phone to the editor at Tundra Books, Kathy Lowinger, and she said it sounded great.AF: And it won the Silver Birch Award?EVB: It won the Silver Birch Award, which is voted on by elementary school children in grades four and five. There’s a list of ten books, and kids have to read a certain number before they can vote. To be on the list, you have to have 5,000 copies in print, so it went into a second printing immediately, and by the end of the year it had a third printing because all the schools in Ontario participating in the program had to buy a copy. I won by a landslide because I didn’t lose any of the girls, but all the boys loved it since it was an action adventure. One of my best experiences ever was at the award ceremony by the Lakeshore with thousands of kids bused in from all over. They’re all screaming, holding up your book like it’s a rock concert. I walked out on stage with a werewolf mask, tore it off, and they’re just screaming and cheering.AF: Amazing. For authors in the trenches looking at how they want their career to look, this is what success looks like.EVB: It...