Kit Reed on The Night Children and Enclave

More and more authors are multi-tasking these days, weaving in and out of different genres and reading constituencies. Kit Reed, who is now writing for children and adults, is a good example of this phenomenon. Her latest novel, The Night Children (Starscape), is about strange gangs of children living after hours in a megamall. Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) has said of her, “Kit Reed’s work freaks me out.” Next year, she'll have an adult novel out, Enclave. Here's her exclusive take on the similarities between the two approaches...

 

Writers don't always know what they're doing while they're doing it. I didn’t know until I saw my two new novels sitting next to each other how closely the two projects were linked.

I wasn't thinking about it when I wrote The Night Children, my first-ever novel for young readers, and although there are kids in it, I know I wrote geeky, menacing Enclave for adults. In no way are they clones; they’re not even lookalikes, but-- wait!

The YA is about feral children living by night in the Castertown Megamall, the biggest mall in the world. And Enclave? It’s about an idealistic ex-Marine who tries to build the perfect society in a revamped Benedictine monastery on a remote mountaintop somewhere off Greece. It seems to be working out for Sarge until a mysterious stranger surfaces and his Academy is threatened by plague...

How could these two books, supposedly designed for different audiences, possibly be alike? Yet they are. It isn't just weird. It's extremely weird.

But it isn't. We write who we are, and there are pieces of us in everything we write. Both books bring wildly different people together in enclosed situations: the Academy in Enclave, and in TNC, the bling-encrusted, multi-faceted MegaMall. Both establishments were created by people with agendas: Sarge, who dreams of creating order through discipline in his Academy, the Enclave, and Night Children's maniacal, vindictive Amos Zozz.

Although they don't occupy nearly as much space in Enclave, the kids quarantined in Sarge's Academy are just as important as Tick and Jule and Lance the Loner, who protect and defend the Castertown MegaMall. So all that demonstrates that different as the two books are, this is the work of one person. Along with... but I hope readers will want both, and they can figure out the rest themselves.

--Kit Reed