Author Chuck Wendig (The Book of Accidents) has a new book on shelves, but this one you’ll find in the Young Adult section. Why the shift from adult horror to young adult thrills and chills? Here’s what Wendig had to say about making the move to middle-grade fiction.
In this, the opening of the book, young Molly Grim shows up on the doorstep of a brother she’s never met, with her uncle and lawyer, Gordo, in tow, in order to demand her half of the inheritance from their deceased parents. Little does she know, the funeral home business she thinks she gets half of? Is more than just a regular funeral home. In fact, it’s a funeral home, mortuary, and cemetery – for monsters.
And then the monsters eat them all and everyone dies in a rain of viscera! Okay, not so much. After all, this is a book for children. Which forces the question, why leave the sinister abattoir of adult horror fiction to write a spooky book for kids? Turns out, I have a kid of my own, and occasionally he’d pick up one of my books and ask, “When can I read this?” And I’d answer, “When you’re 37.” Which seemed unfair. So I decided to write a book for kids, so I’d have something my son could actually read now without having to commit him to years of therapy. So, that’s this book — Dust & Grim, a perfectly kooky, spoopy horror novel for kids and adults alike.
Now, enjoy the first chapter of Dust & Grim.
- how I met my brother
“OUR FATHER IS DEAD AND I HAVE COME TO DISCUSS MATTERS OF HIS ESTATE.”
The girl, age thirteen, stared across the table at the young man, age eighteen. His hair was raven black, slicked back as if each strand had been pinched by hand and lined up like cooked spaghetti. Hers was a messy scribble of fading color, fire red dipped in lavender. He wore satin pajamas the color of copper patina, swimming with little paisleys; she wore a raggedy gray T‑shirt with an X formed of teal lightning bolts, the symbol of her favorite superhero of the Sovereign Super Universe, Zap Girl. (She had declined to wear Zap Girl’s mask to this meeting.) He was scowling. And sweating a little. She was baring her teeth in a smile. His lip was cleft, as if someone had taken a pair of tiny scissors and cut into them the way you might cut through paper or cardboard—long-healed but hard to miss. On her, a pale patch of scar marked her chin like a hyphen—that from a fall five years ago when she’d tried (and tried, and tried, and totally failed) to learn how to skateboard.
They had a few things in common: porcelain skin, a scrutinizing glare, a familiar v‑shaped dent above the bridge of each nose that deepened as they stared each other down.
“I’m sorry,” the young man said, his voice snipped as if with nail clippers, “who are you again?”
She rolled her eyes. “Told you. I’m your sister.”
“Molly,” he said, repeating the name she’d given him.
“Molly.”
“And you are . . . ?”
The girl watched as the young man, her brother, turned his gaze toward the other man, the large fellow sitting to her right. That man was a lumpy dude stuffed into a cheap blue suit. His body shape was that of hot dogs lashed together and swaddled in deer leather. He ran a mitt through a wave of thick, blond hair as he said:
“Gordo.” He jerked a thumb toward the girl. “I’m her lawyer.”
“And my uncle,” the girl clarified. “Sorry. Our uncle.”
Against the far wall, a window-unit air conditioner hummed and clicked: tick tick tick tick, vmmmm.
The young man stiffened. “I don’t have an uncle. Or a sister.”
“Bad news.” The girl winced. “You do.”
“And my father . . .”
“Yes, he died.”
The brother seemed flustered. Like he was trying to figure out if he believed this and if he should care. “I suppose I should ask how?”
Molly shrugged. “Looking at his phone while crossing the street. City bus came up and—”
She clapped her hands hard against each other. “Goodnight, Steve‑o.”
“Ah. I’m . . . sorry? For your loss.”
Molly’s middle tightened. I won’t be sad, I won’t be sad, I won’t be sad. Steve wasn’t worth getting sad over, she told herself. Instead, she hardened her jaw and said, “Don’t be.”
“Ah. Okay then. And so what is the point of this visit again?”
“Thought you’d never ask.” She thrust her index finger in the air and gave it a lasso whirl. “I get half of this. The house, the property, the funeral . . . thing, er, business, whatever. Half of all of it.”
“Half of it,” the young man repeated. “Half of all of it.”
“Bingo, dingo. For the money. I need the money.”
His lips cinched tight like a coin purse. “And you need money why?”
“I gotta pay for costuming school and, to do that, I need money. Money that’s rightfully mine.”
Gordo jumped in: “But which is, ahh, tangled up in alla this.”
The young man forced a trim, thin smile. “Let’s begin again. It’s early in the morning. My name is
Dustin Ashe. You are Molly—”
“Grim. Molly Grim.”
To the man: “And you’re, ahhh, Gordo, her uncle.”
“Yup.” The big man nibbled a thumbnail. “Your uncle, too.”
“Could you explain how exactly we are all related?”
Molly gave Gordo a look. He gave her a loose, slumpy shrug of his big shoulders, so she took the wheel. “Your mother was Polly Ashe. She married Steven—Steve, Stevie, Steve‑o‑roonie—Grim. But Steve‑o bailed when you were what, like, five? Six?”
Agitated, Dustin used the fingers of his right hand to pluck at the fingers of his left hand—perhaps a kind of soothing gesture. “Yes.”
“Do you remember our mom being pregnant with another kid?”
His eyes roamed the room— though Molly guessed he was really looking inward, at his own memories. “I do,” he said crisply. “But she . . . she never had the baby. She lost it.” Under his breath came a panicked mumble: “I mean, I always assumed.”
Molly grinned.
“Wait,” he said. “No. No. You’re—”
“That baby.”
“Impossible.”
“No, just improbable.”
He steepled his fingers and leaned forward. Dubiousness knitted his brow. “You’re saying that she gave you up to him? My— our— father? Gave him a newborn baby and let him”— Dustin walked his fingers across the table like a jaunty little man— “go?”
“That does seem to be the case,” Gordo said, piping
back in.
“Why?”
Molly shrugged. “Who knows. Especially since Dad
was a real turdbutt.”
Steven Grim had rarely spoken of Molly’s mother, but when he had, he did so the way a religious person might talk about an angel: someone almost supernaturally pure. Of course, to Molly, her mother—their mother, she supposed—was no better than any regular, crummy human. The lady was certainly jerk enough to abandon her own daughter with Steve the slacker.
“What I do know is this,” Molly continued. “Half of all this is mine. So we’re going to have to figure that out. If you want, you can pay me the value in, like, cash money, and then I’ll be out of your hair. Or we can just sell the place—”
The already pale Dustin went paler. White as fireplace ash. “We can’t sell this. This is—”
He swallowed whatever it was he was about to say. “This was Mother’s place. You can’t—I can’t—we can’t—”
Molly shrugged. “No, no, it’s cool, you need to think about it.”
“He needs to think about it,” Gordo said. “We understand that.”
“We understand that,” Molly repeated. “In the meantime, I’ll just stay here. It’s a big house. There’s gotta be a guest bedroom.”
Gordo chuckled. “Probably five guest bedrooms.”
Dustin stood up so fast that the chair behind him teetered, then fell to the floor with a clatter. It seemed to startle him further. He had the look about him of a jittery rabbit. Or maybe some kind of polecat? A very nervous polecat who had to pee.
“I need to see proof of this,” he declared, leaning his clenched fists on the table. Was he trembling a little? Molly thought that he was.
Gordo was ready. He spun his alligator-skin briefcase around, popped both latches, and drew out a file. He gave the paper inside it a haphazard spin and it glided across the table, fwipping against Dustin’s knuckles. The young man looked at the paper, then back to Molly, then back to the paper. His eyes flicked between them probably a dozen times. As if he didn’t believe it. Because he probably didn’t.
Oh well. Sorry, brother.
“You can’t stay here. It’s not—I’m not—no.” Dustin looked like a robot about to short-circuit.
He continued, stammering as he spoke: “I—I can’t be responsible for her. She’s young. I—I’m not a caretaker. There’s school—”
“It’s summer,” Molly corrected sweetly.
“And I don’t even know who her caretaker is—”
“She’s emancipated,” Gordo said.
“Emancipated.”
Molly nodded. “Yep. Like, basically an adult.”
“How? She’s too young.”
“Magic.” Gordo wiggled his fingers like a stage magician. At this, Dustin stiffened. “Legal magic,
anyway.”
“I’m going to call my lawyer.”
“Great,” Molly said, putting on a sad face that she told herself was just an act. “That’s cool, super cool, that your first instinct after meeting your long-lost sister is to call your lawyer.”
“And let me do more magic and predict the future,” Gordo said. “You’re gonna call that lawyer, and that lawyer’s gonna tell you I got you in a barrel going over a waterfall, Dusty.”
“Dustin. Not Dusty.”
“Uh‑huh. Point is, we’re prepared to sue. Forget Molly’s financial claim on this home, property, and business. You denying her a simple bed? A place to rest her weary head? Oof. Not gonna look nice in the courts, Dusty.”
“Dustin.”
“It’ll be a huge disruption for you. Not to mention . . . costly. Lawyers, court fees, the loss of business. They might even have to send inspectors out, go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, a black light, a no‑stone-left-unturned attitude. I mean, double oof. All because you couldn’t give your little sister a place to stay while we sort out the finicky bits.”
Something went out of Dustin then. Like the soul gone suddenly from a dead pet. “Fine. Yes. There’s a—a room upstairs. I can—I can have it ready in a tiff. A jiff, I mean. Just, just . . . give me a bit.”
With that, he spun heel‑to‑toe and whirled out of the room.
“Well, that was fun,” Molly said.
Dust & Grim is now available in bookstores, or get your copy here.
