experience. Likewise, you can be watching a horror film, and they think they’re having a normal Monday and you know better. That’s where the horror happens.” Wonder provokes the same effect but with a


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slight difference. Where, according to Stiefvater, the feeling of horror comes from knowledge, the sense of wonder comes from awe and fear of the unknown. Think of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton’s novel, and the feeling of seeing dinosaurs alive, roaming free. It is the feeling of awe and fear – of wonder. Eerily, there is a copy of Crichton’s novel next to Stiefvater when we talk.


Hannelore is brave, attuned to the nuances of


her surroundings and, like June, aware of the danger and intrigue the sweetwater represents. She strides the boundary between wonder and horror alongside the general manager. “When I was a child, when I was a Hannelore of my own, I was very afraid of the things that I think I’m most interested in now. I couldn’t tell the difference between fascination and fear.” Stiefvater writes of Hannelore: “Wonder, horror. Hannelore had a hard time telling feelings apart.” For Stiefvater, magic represents possibility


Shiver Scholastic, £8.99, 9780702306624


Grace becomes fascinated by a pack of wolves, particularly one with yellow eyes. Then, she meets a boy with the exact same eyes.


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When I was a child, I was very afraid of the things that I think I’m most interested in now. I couldn’t tell the difference between fascination and fear


The Listeners captures this sense of


wonder on multiple levels. During the Second World War, the US State Department co-opted luxury hotels across the continent to house Axis diplomats and stage repatriation negotiations. They chose “rural, out of the way places”. The Listeners tells the story of a fictional hotel with the same fate: the Avallon Hotel in West Virginia, in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains. The novel follows June Hudson, the hotel’s


The Raven Boys Scholastic, £8.99, 9781407134611


The first book in The Raven Cycle series. “A dizzying paranormal romance,” said the Los Angeles Times.


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general manager and an indomitable figure who is trailed by three loyal dachshunds. Her life and the hotel’s existence are threatened one night in 1942 when three FBI agents and a State Department official arrive. The hotel will now host hundreds of Axis diplomats. All the real hotels used by the US government


Call Down the Hawk Scholastic, £8.99, 9781407194462


The first book in The Dreamer trilogy. Ronan can make parts of his dreams reality. But there are those that would do anything to destroy him.


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were built on top of hot springs and Stiefvater’s hotel is no different, except for a wondrous twist. In the novel, the spring is called “sweetwater” and is one of the reasons the hotel appears so luxurious. Throughout the establishment, fonts and fountains gurgle with the sweetwater and four springs offer complete bodily submersion. But the water is a tricky beast; it responds to emotions, amplifying them to a heady degree. If the guests are happy, then the sweetwater augments this feeling. If the guests are unhappy, the sweetwater roils with anger and threatens the hotel’s luxurious equilibrium. By appeasing the water, June ensures that the hotel remains unassailable and her staff remain safe. But the new guests threaten everything. Another key character is Hannelore, the young


daughter of the German cultural attaché and now a resident at the Avallon Hotel. Hannelore cannot speak and her life is threatened by the prospect of returning to Nazi Germany. One diplomat, a member of the Gestapo, says sterilisation would be the best outcome. The worst – death.


and hidden meaning. “I love metaphor, and I also love that sense of liminal space being a place for change – and magic gets to be that liminal space. It both amplifies who we are but also provokes us into a change.” The magic of the sweetwater is never fully explained and part of the story’s beauty lies in this unknowability. “I think fantasy, in many ways, comes from having those limited interpretations of magic. In adult general fiction, the magic – if there is magic – is left up for you to interpret as the reader.” The Listeners is grounded in historical fact,


but the sweetwater gives the novel a mythic quality. Stiefvater describes mythology as “taking the reality of the situation, the emotional truth, and amplifying it,” and this is what occurs in The Listeners. The sweetwater gives the narrative a mythic edge, the water emphasising the emotional heart and conflict at the centre of the story. “It’s taking the whole story, not just the facts, but the way we feel about the facts, and putting it out there. That’s what the magic needs to do.” Even the name of the hotel has echoes of Arthurian legend. Unlike Stiefvater’s YA fantasy series,


where immediacy and plot are king, The Listeners is meditative, and it was Stiefvater’s “risky goal” to have the prose read like a forgotten memory of the reader’s past. When writing the novel, she set out to “break”, “stretch and “terraform” the rules of writing for adults. Stiefvater wants readers to remember the book as though they lived it, “to have that vague sense of memories that aren’t yours, of wandering the halls of the place”. The novel opens with a line that is repeated


at the end: “The day the hotel changed forever began as any other.” And so, with the plot already a foregone conclusion, Stiefvater aims to stretch not only the rules of adult fiction, but the reader’s experience of reading. “You’re not sure, in the same traditional sense of cloth- bound fiction, why you’re turning the pages; but you are turning the pages. Afterwards, you feel a little lost because you were someplace and now you’re not there anymore.” The Listeners will linger with readers for years


to come. It is a visceral, impressionistic novel that showcases a writer at the height of her powers. “I do definitely feel like the kind of creator I was has been forever changed by The Listeners,” says Stiefvater. To read this novel is to be held in a state of wonderment, to be both in awe and fearful of the hotel, the war and the sweetwater that courses beneath it all.


07


STEPHEN VOSS


Books Author Profile


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