“That’s a time-honored thing going way back to Alice in Wonderland. “I think all successful middle grade novels, the parents have to check out one way or another,” he said. The story takes place in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s when a group of four 12-year-olds are confronted with supernatural strangers swapping out all the adults in their small town. Middle graders want that too, but there’s less for them.” “There’s a temptation to explore what it is to be scared. “I think that there’s sort of a fearlessness of the world that comes along with being a teenager, that wants to be challenged,” Meloy said. The Stars Did Wander Darkling is his fifth book and has a more distinctly horror vibe that won’t surprise anyone who’s ever listened to The Hazards of Love. He’s since released two sequels, along with another children’s book The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid. It would be more than a decade later that the story would become Meloy’s first fantasy novel for kids, Wildwood, with illustrations by Ellis. “We decided we’d make this story about this young girl who is abandoned by her parents basically and has to go out into the world to discover the missing cog in a mechanical boy prince.”
“When she first moved to Portland in 2000, we’d just hang out and just make up stuff together,” he said.
Even then, he tried to make time for creating stories with his now-wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, all while they both worked in the service industry and got their respective music and art careers going.
“These stories and narratives seemed to perfectly collide my love of storytelling that I had as a young age with this music that I was discovering.”Īnd so, despite getting his creative writing degree at the University of Montana, he moved to Portland and started a band. “I was enamored with songwriters like Shane McGowan of The Pogues and Robyn Hitchcock who created these worlds inside of their songs,” he recently told me at an event for his new middle-grade novel, The Stars Did Wander Darkling. But he soon realized his love of music didn’t have to replace his love of storytelling. Then hearing bands like R.E.M., Husker Du, The Replacements, and The Jesus and Mary Chain, took him on another path. Long before Colin Meloy became the frontman for the long-running Portland rock band The Decemberists, he wanted to be a writer.
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