Meet Joy Wells, an eleven-year-old literary horror fan and proud resident of Spooking, the eerie old town overlooking the plastic suburban paradise of Darlington where she and brother Byron are forced to go to school.
When the mayor of Darlington announces that a theme park is to be built over Spooking Bog -- a mysterious environment home to strange characters and quite possibly a murderous creature straight from the pages of her favorite fiction -- Joy knows she must act or eventually lose her beloved town to the mindless forces of urban development forever.
But as an offbeat young girl who already has enough problems just getting through an average day at Winsome Elementary, Joy knows it won't be easy. But what she doesn't know is that an embittered son of Spooking has also returned, and will stop at nothing to ensure the town's utter destruction...
PJ Bracegirdle on FIENDISH DEEDS, from Simon & Schuster's Behind The Book series:
"With FIENDISH DEEDS, the first book of The Joy of Spooking trilogy, I wanted to kick off a quirky, comedic mystery that packed some serious chills. I loved the idea of a young heroine who revels in how the worn-out relics of the past still echo with secrets and stories—and that’s what I found in Joy Wells.
To set the stage for her, I took a lot of inspiration from classic literary figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. That said, I wasn’t as interested in trying to imitate their startling works as I was in reinventing their fascinating private lives, which were often marked by the bizarre and the tragic. So I recast them as a single character—a reclusive author from a bygone age with a history both sinister and supernatural. It was this story that would become the heart of the mystery surrounding the town of Spooking.
This trilogy itself however would be set in the modern day amid the absurd trappings, distractions, and horrors of a world feasting on itself. For that reason I needed a distinctively modern villain, someone both a product and a victim of these times. Someone selfish, greedy, and egotistical in the extreme. What’s more, I imagined somebody once a talented artist but who now embodies all the bitterness and frustration of living in obscurity; and who like so many great artists will tragically only be cherished once they are gone.
And so it came to me that an aging punk rocker would be a good fit for this villain—and a hilarious one. He would be a person who had gone full circle to become everything he once detested. That character soon developed into Octavio Phipps, a failed musician who now works as assistant to the mayor of a neighboring suburban sprawl. It was then just a case of unleashing him on his mission: to destroy Spooking, the weird old town he blames for his woes…"
© 2008 Simon & Schuster
