Taking a look at the “So… I Met” series….
By Paul McAvoy
The series of books was not actually
planned… I don’t think I sat down and thought, I will do a series: I guess it
just happened. I actually wrote the first few for my children: So… I Met a Ghost and So… I Met an Alien were written around
the same time. So… I Met a Ghost, is
the darker of the two, and it features a strange boy called Cal who likes to
draw pictures of graves near to his dad’s house. He is from a broken home and
has a sister: he sees his Dad a few times a week, staying over. I suppose
‘Ghost’ deals a lot with how it is for kids when their parents split up, the
sense of loss and confusion a child must feel when both his parents no longer
want to be together, and perhaps his trips to a local graveyard to draw
gravestones helps him deal with it. But it is during such a visit he first sees
a ghost…
In ‘Alien,’ things are a bit lighter. There
is a darkness, however, as the main character Danny’s mother passed away a year
or so earlier and him, his sister and father moved away from the hustle and
bustle of life in London to sleepy Somerset. The book deals with his loss, but
there is also a couple of bullies at his school, who he is finding it hard to
deal with. Unable to take the bullying anymore, he skips school, but just so happens
to save the life of an alien in doing so. His interaction with the alien is
quite light-hearted and in a race against time book, he tries to get the alien
to safety from the Men in Dark (more of them later).
The third book is So… I Met a Demon. In this one I wanted to chronical a child’s life
over a series of years, watching him grow a year old in each chapter. Every May
Day (1st of May), Ben sees the same girl in the gardens of the local
Spook House, which everyone thinks is haunted. No one can see her but him. The
question is who is she and why does she not seem to age?
The forth book in all about the Vampire. It
is the first in my series to feature a girl as the main character. (Like Doctor
Who casting a female doctor, maybe this was long overdue). Jesse wakes in woods
in Scotland, having no memory of how she got there. The book at one point was
going to be about a reaper, but it seemed to evolve into more of a story about a
vampire. Jesse meets a man in dark at a local police station and her memories
come back and she tells her story of how she died and was given a chance to
live again by a reaper – she had to perform three tasks: one of which was to
obtain blood from a vampire…
Although the main characters in the books
are always different to the previous ones, there is a recurring man in dark,
called ‘Bobby,’ and as each book passes, we learn a little bit more about him
and the Department of Paranormal Investigations (DPI), where he works.
Bobby features a lot in the latest book, So… I Met a Werewolf and I guess we have
two main characters here: We have Ollie who is saved by a mysterious teenage
girl (Leah) in a Scottish glen, having tumbled off a mountain and injuring his
leg. We have Ollie’s story, and also Leah’s as she tells him how she became a
werewolf while they sit in the middle of nowhere in an old building at the side
of the mountain, Ollie’s leg too badly damaged for him to walk anywhere, the
full moon rising quickly…
I am interested how people will take So...
I Met a Werewolf. The previous four were more YA horror/adventure type of
reads, but this is all about the story. I have tried to create a slow build YA
horror here in the hope that the reader spends their time with their breath
held until the last page is turned. Is Leah a werewolf? Is she deluded?
But what of the future? Well, there are
plenty of supernatural beings out there to meet and there are warlocks and
witches as well… I have also got plans to tell Bobby’s tale one day - how did he become involved in the DPI? I wish
to re-visit some of the previous characters as well, see how they are
progressing in life. I did not think this series would go on to five books, but
I actually think that there are more to come… many more…
The books are all available in both
paperback and on Kindle.
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