top 10 formative authors & series (of my youth)
authors & series that changed my brain chemistry as a tween and teen
i read a lot as a kid, way more than i do today, and i was not supervised even a little bit, so i probably read a lot of stuff i shouldn’t have, and it has all greatly impacted my various hyperfixations and writing tendencies and even writing styles. and so, here are ten authors and series that i read somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15 that greatly influenced me as a reader and writer.
(p.s. obviously, harry potter was one of the biggest influences on me, but alas, we will not be giving it attention here)
10. marianne curley (guardians of time);
i only ever read a single one of curley’s series, guardians of time, and i read it when i was a little bit older, but was obsessed with it. the series follows a group of teens with powers who are trying to prevent the order of chaos from changing history and wreaking havoc. it’s a lot of living double lives (high school drama and secret organizations side by side!) and feeling like the most important teenager in the world. there’s also an age-gap relationship that i was very into and that probably influenced me a little more than i would like (pretty sure if i read that now i’ll side-eye it lol).
9. lynne ewing (daughters of the moon);
another entry in the superpowered teenagers with secret lives category, i barely remember anything about this series, and i don’t think i ever finished it, but i was absolutely obsessed with these covers as a tween. this series featured cool powers, morally gray male love interests, complex female friendships, and…questionable poc representation but it was the only representation i experienced back then. for me, these books very much fall into a kind of magical girl genre that dovetails with tv shows like sailor moon and totally spies, which were formative in their own way.
8. lois duncan;
lois duncan is best known for her hit novel i know what you did last summer, but i think that particular book made the least impact on me. i read all her works, but the three that left a lasting impact on me were: killing mr griffin, down a dark hall, and lost in time. down a dark hall is the og dark academia, featuring a boarding school with only four students, all of whom have strange abilities (one of them, i remember, paints pictures so horrifying they turn your stomach, a plot point i still would like to try my hand at). killing mr griffin is about a group of teenagers who accidentally-on-purpose murder their teacher, and the teacher’s pet who gets dragged into it. lost in time is about a girl with an uncanny sense of time who discovers her new relatives are not aging. duncan’s books were a balanced mix of realistic suspense and horror with, occasionally, hints of the supernatural. they were page-turners with dark, moody atmospheres and complex teenage girls.
7. v.c. andrews;
when i tell you i was absolutely obsessed with the freakish, gothic decadence of andrews’ work…i sought out and read almost every single one of her novels, which is a lot, since the real v.c. andrews actually died in 1986 after writing only seven books (among them, her most famous, the sibling incest bible, flowers in the attic, and i read the entire series multiple times), and then a ghostwriter hired by her estate took over, proceeding to write over 40 books, and is, i believe, still writing today. i stopped reading after around the 25-book mark, but the damage was done lol. to this day i’m obsessed with excessively tawdry gothic tropes, freakish characters, mysterious manors, and family secrets.
6. christopher pike;
i read almost everything christopher pike had to offer. i don’t remember any of the plots of his books, but i do remember the atmosphere: thick, dark, moody, bleak. somewhat trashy but in a good way. gives written by straight white man in the 1990s in a very particular way. the two that made the most impact on me were sati, about a woman claiming to be god, and the last vampire, about a thousand year old vampire, but i devoured all of his entries. they were weird, they were thrilling, and they had banger covers. there was always an undercurrent of wrongness to pike’s work, like something was waiting just around the corner.
5. r.l. stine;
who among us hasn’t read goosebumps and fear street? when i first got my library card and headed to the tween section of the library, there was a massive shelf of just r.l. stine books. i was drawn by the lurid covers and crazy plots. when i finished every single goosebumps book the library had, i moved onto fear street, culminating in an obsession with the fear street trilogy, which explained why fear street was haunted, and, spoiler, it’s about a witch burned at the stake, and there began an obsession with maligned witches. despite being for children and younger teens, there were some truly horrifying scenes and themes in these books, some of which have stuck with me to this day, and they have definitely impacted my horror writing.
4. darren shan;
vampires and demons and over-the-top gory violence. darren shan really gave me everything. i started with the cirque du freak series in my quest to read everything vampire (and was also delighted by shan’s decision to name the main character after himself, making my young dumb self hope it was a true story), then moved onto the demonata series, which also has the distinction of being the (1) book series my non-reader brother ever read. the demonata series is the one that likely had the bigger influence on me — i love this horrifically violent and terrifying portal fantasy about a demon world just adjacent to our own, and the vicious demons that inhabit it and want to kill us all. the series does not pull punches — it’s not afraid to murder characters in horrific ways, or put our main characters through the emotional wringer. in particular, bec, set in 4th century ireland, was particularly moving.
3. cate tiernan (sweep series);
tiernan’s sweep (sweep, broom, witches, ha) series is single-handedly responsible for my obsession with witches and magical lore. after reading sweep, i did frenzied research on witchcraft, purchased grimoires, started journaling in a “book of shadows”, researched witch trials, taught myself spells, considered converting to wicca (even looked up local covens), and just did my best to become a witch. i have a distinct memory of being a tween, sitting in my dark bedroom with a candle, and trying to light said candle on fire with my mind, because i was convinced tiernan’s series was based off reality.
sweep is about a girl named morgan who discovers she is a “blood witch” — that is, a witch descended from witches, rather than a convert, and with that she discovers her family heritage and all the danger that comes with it. i still remember the sheer force of whimsical wonder and magic i felt when i read book of shadows, the first entry in the series, that desperation for magic to be real (tiernan’s chapter epigraphs, which i only discovered later were entirely made up, are still some of my favorites of all time). i’ve read this series more times i can count, and for years, even into adulthood, it was a comfort series.
2. anne rice;
ah, the queen of vampires. there’s obviously been an anne rice revival as of late, given the popularity of the tv adaptation interview with the vampire (which i adore), but i started reading anne rice at the ripe old age of 11 years old. i…probably should not have been doing that, and a lot of it probably went over my head, but i walked away with an obsession with vampires and a nascent understanding of queerness (there’s a line about bisexuality in vittorio the vampire that i remember verbatim). i read nearly all the vampire chronicles books and most of the witching hour books. vampires took up most of my brainspace for decades, and because of anne rice i would watch and read almost any vampire media (i still remember my disappointment when i picked up twilight lmao) for years to come. i still harbor hopes of someday putting out a vampire novel.
1. amelia atwater-rhodes;
the kiesha’ra series was probably the first epic fantasy series i read that made a significant impact on me. it’s about a war between two species that has been raging for years, until the heirs of each of these species decide to enter into an arranged marriage to end the war. naturally, what starts off as a tense, frosty relationship turns into true love. this is probably where my obsession with arranged marriages/forced proximity comes from.
atwater-rhodes also wrote vampire books — her first book, in the forests of the night, she wrote when she was only thirteen, a fact that astonished my thirteen-year-old self, and i became determined to be a writer from then on.
atwater-rhodes was also my first true, explicit introduction to queerness, as the fourth keisha’ra book, wolfcry, features a character coming to terms with being a lesbian (the author herself is a lesbian!), and then entering a relationship with another woman. midnight predator, about a female vampire hunter hunting a female vampire, has undertones of queerness and feels like a precursor to house of hunger.
atwater-rhodes marked the shift in my reading from mostly horror and thriller and vampires to epic fantasy, and it was she who truly introduced me the possibility of grand scope and multi-generational sagas in fantasy. it was because of her that i started writing epic fantasy as a teenager.
cheers,
hadeer