The Non Reluctant Reader YA Paranormal Spooktacular Day Two: Amy Garvey, author of Glass Heart

Welcome to the second day of The Non Reluctant Reader YA Paranormal Spooktacular! I'm pleased to welcome the first author of the event, Amy Garvey, author of the witchy and zombie novels Cold Kiss and Glass Heart! First Amy Garvey will give us an awesome guest post and then there will be a giveaway of both Cold Kiss and Glass Heart! So read on and prepared to be scared! And make sure when tweeting about it you use the hashtag #NRRYASpooktacular! See the schedule of the entire event and all the authors featured HERE.

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Wren can do things that other people can only dream of. Make it snow on a clear, crisp day. Fly through an abandoned tunnel. Bring a paper bird to life.
Wren knows her abilities are tinged with danger--knows how easy it is to lose control--but she can't resist the intoxicating rush. And now that she has Gabriel by her side, someone who knows what she can do--what she "has" done--she finally feels free to be herself.
But as Wren explores the possibilities of her simmering powers, Gabriel starts pushing her away. Telling her to be careful. Telling her to "stop." The more he cautions her, the more determined Wren becomes to prove that she can handle things on her own. And by the time she realizes that Gabriel may be right, it could be too late to bring him back to her side.

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Amy Garvey's Terrifying TV Tale

I’ve loved Halloween since I was a kid. Well, that sounds silly – what kid doesn't like putting on a costume and demanding candy from strangers? What I mean is I loved to be scared, regardless of the time of year – Halloween was simply my official day of celebration. I loved anything that even vaguely had to do with the spooky or the haunted or the terrifying – give me an old crumbling gravestone, or an attic cloaked in shadow and spider webs, or an abandoned house on top of a hill and I was in heaven. I don’t know if it was in my genetic makeup – “baby fine hair, green eyes, absolutely cannot ice skate, thinks ghosts are neato” – or if I created my own addiction, but it started when I was about eight.

Those were the days when TV sets were often only black and white and had rabbit ears, and you had to GET UP to change the channel or the volume, so you sometimes ending up watching strange stuff out of sheer laziness. On this day I was out on the screen porch, where we had a little tabletop TV to watch in the summer. I was bored, it was drizzling, and I’d finished my book, so I wandered out there and turned it on. Those were also the days when a) there was no cable, b) there were only about ten channels if you were lucky, maybe a couple more if you braved the wilds of UHF, and c) children’s programming was limited mostly to Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, and Scooby Doo. Shows for kids on a random Saturday afternoon? They didn’t even exist.

I have no idea what channel I landed on as I turned the dial, except that the picture was grainy black and white and someone was screaming. I was in. Unfortunately, the movie ended about ten minutes after I turned it on, and to this day I have no idea what it was. A vaguely British boy in old-fashioned clothes and an old woman were in a crumbling old house – I remember a close-up of really appalling Victorian wallpaper – and they were arguing. Someone had hidden something? There might have been a trunk involved? Either way, the last shot as the credits rolled was another face, possibly a young woman’s or maybe the boy’s, screaming and appearing to melt as the camera panned away to show this very Addams Family-esque residence in all its macabre glory. I was heartbroken. What had happened? Was there a ghost or a spell or a body in the basement? All I knew was that it was unlikely I would ever find out, but every time I stumbled across anything that even resembled a black and white horror movie after that, I stopped to watch. I thought the title might be The House That Screamed, but I was wrong, and I couldn’t even look it up until I was in college, when Leonard Maltin started putting out his movie encyclopedia.

But maybe that movie was why I chose Jane-Emily, a classic ghost story, at the next school book fair. Or why I loved Richard Peck’s The Ghost Belonged to Me and Ghosts I Have Been, and tried to watch Dark Shadows (the original!) whenever I could after school. By the time I hit middle school I was reading Stephen King and sneaking into such fine cinematic classics as Friday the 13th and Prom Night (the originals!). I was a horror junkie, and that hasn’t changed. The show I was most excited for this fall? American Horror Story: Asylum. The last movie I rented from Red Box? Cabin in the Woods. Definitely an addiction.  

Which I guess makes it sort of predictable that my first YA novel was about a girl who raised her boyfriend from the dead, and that’s perfectly okay with me. Meanwhile, if anyone knows what movie started all this, call me!

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Giveaway
Amy has been very generous and offered up signed copies of Cold Kiss and Glass Heart for giveaway to help you get your spook on! Enter after the page break!

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