Local author Wendelin Van Draanen collects the world around her. She picks up pieces, facts, and interesting tidbits—a photo from a Yahoo News article here, something glimpsed in an Arizona airport there—and stores them away like puzzle pieces to be assembled later.
Her problem (if you can really call it a problem) is that she doesn’t always immediately know into which puzzle a particular piece fits. Individual bits can sit around for ages, but Van Draanen has a mind for puzzles, and when they ultimately click into a certain book, they really click.
Take that Yahoo News photo. Years ago, Van Draanen came across an image of a grinning skull with “really bad teeth” while browsing around the web on her computer. It was wearing a blue knit cap and had a cigarette clamped in its jaws. She read the article explaining the social and historical significance behind the gussied-up exposed cranium (no spoilers here) and thought, “Wow! Who can believe this? This is going to be in a Sammy Keyes book someday.”
Then she wrote some other books.
The image’s someday finally came with Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls, the 14th book in Van Draanen’s popular series about a girl living in the fictional Santa Martina—recognizable to anyone with even a passing familiarity of its real-world Santa Maria inspiration.
Such a prop may seem a bit macabre for a book about junior high students navigating school, life, parents and guardians, relationships with each other, and the inevitable mystery, but Night of Skulls kicks off on Halloween with a haunted house and winds its way through other holidays that share roughly the same real estate on the calendar, but are probably less known to average U.S. trick-or-treaters.
Van Draanen explained that the one image of the skull kick-started her thinking: “My goal was to present in an entertaining way how different cultures view and deal with death.” Then she began assembling the puzzle—or, in this case, skeleton—of her book. With a frame in place, she fleshed it out with growing-up drama and a missing-persons case to unravel.
So Sammy’s friends dress up like zombies as they make the neighborhood rounds for candy. They discover picnicking in the cemetery as part of Dia de los Muertos. They get a surprise crash course in embalming. Essentially, they learn some of the many things Van Draanen collected and researched as she put together her story.
The former teacher said that she doesn’t necessarily set out to teach young readers something with her books, but she does admit that she likes to share information. And the information in Night of Skulls is more than just interesting facts about mourning or memorial customs from around the globe.
“I have what I call a healthy fear of death,” Van Draanen said. “I think I obsess about it more than the average person.”
Sammy struggles with the idea of mortality, too, in this book. And as she learns how people around her deal with the trials of life and its inevitable counterpart, she learns to better express herself, her ideas, her fears.
Van Draanen said writing this book helped her deal with her own thoughts on the often-traumatic reality, bringing her a measure of peace—which wasn’t necessarily the expected outcome.
For someone who strives for realism, this book proved a challenge at first. Van Draanen has stuffed herself into storage compartments, has only semi-jokingly tried to get herself thrown in jail, and has generally lived through many of the crazy paces through which she puts her characters, all in the name of research. The resulting realism on the page adds authenticity to the story. For Night of Skulls, however, she faced a challenge beyond finding people willing to talk to her about their niches of postmortem expertise. She had to embrace the grave.
“I don’t like to go to cemeteries,” she said. “I don’t like the thought of going into a mortuary. I don’t like seeing hearses. … I didn’t know about how a grave is dug out. I didn’t know what the liner was. I didn’t know how a body is put in.”
Then she met the friendly staff at the Marshall-Spoo Sunset Funeral Chapel in Grover Beach. And soon, she was riding in a golf cart around the Arroyo Grande cemetery with district manager Michael Marsalek, hearing about the historical importance of maintaining graves and graveyards.
“It really helped me get through these walls I’ve built, just shielding, just blocking it all out,” she said.
It also made her realize she couldn’t write some characters the way she’d been planning. Her hosts at Marshall-Spoo were so helpful, so enthusiastic and encouraging, Van Draanen tweaked her story a bit.
The finished tale is funny and genuinely touching, with a solid mystery and enough junior-high ethical dilemmas to make guidance counselors-in-training seriously earn their stripes.
And even though Night of Skulls has just hit shelves around the country, Van Draanen is currently out of the realm of coffins and cremations and into the back alleys of Las Vegas. She’s writing the next-next Sammy Keyes book. No. 16 is coming together with more of her inevitable puzzle pieces, some of which, this time around, are shaped like Elvis.
Executive Editor Ryan Miller wants a sugar skull with his name on it. Send his obituary to rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2011.
