My Favorite Things with Kate Alice Marshall

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Kate Alice Marshall, whose latest release, Rules for Vanishing, comes out tomorrow, September 24th, from Viking Books!

What does Kate love when she’s not writing about missing girls and vengeful ghosts? Spoiler alert: middle-grade spookiness, an utterly frustrating game that can’t be put down, and a peek into a galaxy far, far away. Interested? Read on to learn more!

Small Spaces & Dead Voices by Katherine Arden

I have a confession to make: I am a total wimp when it comes to horror. I am that person that reads the plot summary of new horror movies, because I don’t have the nerves to sit through them. When the Haunting of Hill House Netflix series came out, I spent several nights sleeping with the lights on. The covers of R.L. Stine books gave me nightmares as a kid.

And yet I love spooky things and always have. What I appreciate so much about Katherine Arden‘s middle grade novel Small Spaces, and now its sequel Dead Voices, is that they walk the delicate line of being genuinely unsettling and spooky without ever being vicious. The danger is real, but hope and love and heroism are real as well. They are full of empathy, humor, literary allusions, timeless archetypes, and good old-fashioned frights. Small Spaces is fantastic, and Dead Voices is even better, with a ghost story that will have you shivering for more than one reason.

I owe Small Spaces, and Katherine herself, for convincing me to finally write my own spooky middle grade novel, the idea for which I’ve been sitting on for close to seven years. Spooky middle grade is really having a moment, which I couldn’t be more delighted about.

Heaven’s Vault

I was never the person who learned Elvish or Klingon, but I have always loved stories that weave the complexities of language and translation into the story. My friend Erin M. Evans is fantastic at this — her fantasy languages feel real, and she uses them to illuminate the world, the characters, and the themes of the book, not just to supply some strange-sounding syllables to sound cool. So when I heard about a game that centers around translating an ancient, lost language, I was in.

Now, Heaven’s Vault is far from a perfect game. A great deal of the gameplay is clunky (infuriatingly so), and at times it’s frustratingly opaque about what the consequences of certain types of decisions or actions might be. The less said about the camera controls and the travel system, the better. And yet, I can’t stop playing it. I just figured out that that symbol marks a verb, you see, and this symbol conveys the concept of a place or structure, which means that this word must be “palace,” which completely changes my understanding of that phrase I found three hours ago at the dig site on that other moon…

As frustrating as much of the secondary gameplay might be — and it is very frustrating — I love Heaven’s Vault because I want more games like this. Games about learning and exploration and the mysteries of the past, with a core mechanic that’s not about the perfect headshot but about understanding.

Chewie and the Porgs

My son is three. He’s a sensitive little soul, like I was, which means it’ll be a long time before he’s ready for the Star Wars movies. Now, I don’t mind if my kids end up with divergent interests and don’t love the same media I loved growing up — but Star Wars is special to me. Special as in, the opening music in The Force Awakens made me cry when I saw it in the theater (to be fair, I was pregnant). So I am delighted to be able to share a little bit of that through the kid-friendly Star Wars books and toys, such as Chewie and the Porgs. It’s wonderful to see my son start to get the sense that there’s this huge fantasy (or science fantasy) universe that’s waiting out there for him to explore. The interconnected stories and characters — like the hint that this Luke Skywalker dude might have his own story to tell — make it feel real to him.

Although now I do have to deal with him crying because he can’t roll his tongue to make Wookie noises.

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of the Young Adult novels I Am Still Alive and Rules for Vanishing, along with the upcoming Eden Eld middle grade series. Her science fiction and fantasy fiction has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere.

She lives outside of Seattle with her husband, a dog named Vonnegut, and her two kids. They all conspire to keep her on her toes.

You can find her on twitter @kmarshallarts, or visit her website at katemarshallbooks.com

Author Photo by Alice Marshall

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