Annette Curtis Klause broke new ground in young adult literature with The Silver Kiss, a book that is at once "sexy, scaring, and moving," according to Roger Sutton writing in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. A vampire love story, Klause's first novel is a darkly seductive thriller with heart and message.

Born in Bristol, England, in 1953, Klause became fascinated with grisly things at an early age. "My mother read and sang to me," Klause explained. "But my daddy used to sit me on his lap and tell me the plots to gangster and monster movies. I knew all about Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Jimmy Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson before I ever saw any of their movies." Her father also let her speak to Willoughby, an imaginary little boy who lived down his throat.

When she was seven, Klause and her family moved north to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She recalls that her first experience with creative writing occurred when she was incapacitated with a twisted ankle at age eight or nine. Klause wrote a poem about her mother ironing and decided from then on to save all her poems in a notebook. Soon she was writing and illustrating her own books, mostly about a cat and the kittens she has. At age ten she and a neighborhood friend began making up plays and performing them on a tape recorder. "The plays usually involved some kind of humorous mistake," Klause recalled, "like a woman calling up a plant nursery instead of a nursery school for her child."

It was also about this time when Klause wrote her first (unpublished) bit of horror, The Blood Ridden Pool of Solen Goom. Each of the chapters ended with ". . . and more blood flowed into the blood ridden pool of Solen Goom." Increasingly she read fantasy and science-fiction books, in addition to Mark Twain and, as she got older, the beatnik books of Jack Kerouac. "I wanted desperately to be a beatnik," she remembered. She also read her first vampire book at age fourteen: Jane Gaskell's The Shiny Narrow Grin, which was Klause's initial inspiration for her first novel many years later. "I was smitten by the pale young man who appeared in a few suspenseful scenes," Klause related, "and became mesmerized with the whole concept of vampires." Initially, Klause responded to this fascination by writing poetry, which she described as "a pretentious, over-written, dreadful sequence of poems interspersed with prose called The Saga of the Vampire[also unpublished]." These early writings would later become invaluable for Klause when she set out on the journey of her first novel.

Klause's life was distinctly changed when she was fifteen and her father moved the family to Washington, DC, for career reasons. In high school Klause continued writing poetry. After finishing college in 1976, Klause went on to graduate school in library science. She took poetry workshops in college, but poetry was soon replaced by short stories once she graduated and started working in libraries. Klause began sending her work out to magazines, collecting numerous rejection letters. Several of her poems and a short story were published in anthologies and small magazine reviews, but it took several years of concerted effort to find her voice and her audience.

"I finally took a writing workshop with Larry Callen, a well-known children's writer," Klause noted. "I knew I wanted to write for young people. I'm still working through my own adolescence, so it seemed appropriate. I continued with further ones. I still go to the writing group Larry Callen introduced me to, and often chuckle about how an idea or action will affect the people in my group even as I am writing." Klause soon graduated from short stories, and with the help and encouragement of Callen, set to work on a novel. "I wanted to write for teenagers, so I thought back to what I liked to read at that age. In a way, I stole from myself with The Silver Kiss, because I looked at my old writing notebooks and found the vampire poem I had written as a teenager, and I realized I had some good ideas in that poem. So I just borrowed them."

Although the main characters were lifted from Klause's own adolescent poems, the plot was contemporary and, according to some critics, daring for a young adult title. The story of a seventeen-year-old girl whose world is in turmoil, The Silver Kiss blends horror, suspense, and romantic longing. Zoe's mother is dying of cancer, her father is too upset to provide consolation to his daughter, and her best friend is moving away. A series of murders have rocked Zoe's town: women found with their throats slashed and drained of blood.

However, the teen still ventures to her favorite park at night to think and dream. There she first catches a glimpse of an eerily handsome, silver-haired boy who changes her life. Simon, as Zoe comes to learn, is a vampire, alive for centuries, and on the trail of his own brother--the one who has been responsible for the recent murders and also the one who killed Simon's mother three centuries ago. Simon has tracked this brother through the ages, seeking vengeance. Drawn to Zoe, he feels a glimmer of life because of this attraction and helps her understand her own feelings about her mother's imminent death. In the process she learns to understand her own loneliness and fears. In return she helps him find his brother, and ultimately to end his own tormented existence. The pull between Zoe and Simon is strongly sensual, full of the dark passions of the vampire legend.

"The book was a couple of years in the writing," Klause acknowledged. "Then another two for rewriting and marketing. A couple of editors liked it early on, but told me that the vampire was much more convincing than Zoe. Which is understandable: I sympathize more with the Simon character, the outsider." Finally, a former editor of School Library Journal for whom Klause had written reviews and who had since moved into publishing at Delacorte saw the manuscript and wanted to publish it. "He called me at work," Klause recalled, "and I figured here was another rejection. When he said Delacorte wanted to publish it, I thought I would float away."

Even in galleys at the 1990 American Library Association conference, the book was causing a stir. Writing in the Wilson Library Bulletin, Cathi MacRae found that The Silver Kiss"marries every surefire ingredient of [young-adult] appeal with literary vision and graceful style . . . Klause's fluid writing style casts its own spells. Zoe's 'quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions' is Klause's own, and the passionate intensity of her writing will draw YA readers as surely as Simon drew Zoe." In addition, Molly Kinney, writing in School Library Journal, called the work "a well-drawn, powerful, and seductive novel," and added, "The climax is a roller-coaster ride in reality, the macabre, death, and love."

Klause moved on to a blending of science fiction and mystery genres for her second book. "I think there may be something of the masochist in me," Klause joked. "With The Silver Kiss I needed to do some preliminary research into vampire lore, but I had read so much of it already that I was fairly well steeped in it. With Alien Secrets it was completely different. I had to create an entire new world. I had to extrapolate what life would be like when the story takes place--what events had occurred on Earth and how people would think and act in my new world. I had to do astronomical research to find out how people would travel through space, in what sequence and through which galaxies. And I had to track down a likely star that might have habitable planets around it." But the book itself does not contain a lot of complex, scientific jargon or data. At heart, it is a mystery and another outsider story. "That is the trick," Klause explained. "To do all this research so that I am completely immersed in my make-believe world to the point where the reader believes in it as well. You don't use all the research. It's like an iceberg. It's the stuff below the surface that makes the setting real."

Alien Secrets tells the story of Puck, a thirteen-year-old earthling on her way to visit her parents on the planet Shoon. Expelled from her private school in England, Puck is carrying plenty of emotional luggage with her. Aboard the space ship she meets Hush, a native of Shoon. Hush has problems, as well, for someone has pilfered a precious statue that Hush was returning to his planet. Together the two search the spaceship to find the statue, are caught up in all sorts of intrigues involving murder and smuggling, and finally are able to work through their problems, helping each other reach greater self-understanding in the process. "It's Murder on the Orient Express, space style," deemed Roger Sutton, writing in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. "Alien Secrets demonstrates Klause's versatility and affirms her talent," Donna L. Scanlon wrote in Voice of Youth Advocates, adding, "Klause assembles a sympathetic and well rounded cast of characters." Susan L. Rogers in School Library Journal mentioned that Puck's "experiences with alien friends and enemies provide lessons applicable to the changing relationships between races and ethnic groups here on Earth as well." In addition, Maeve Visser Kroth told Horn Book readers that Klause "uses her setting to explore themes of imperialism and oppression of native peoples," and called Alien Secrets "a rich, exciting story."

"I always felt like an outsider growing up," Klause said. "I was the one with red hair, the one always staring out the window. I am interested in outsiders and what we can all learn from them. In my vampire book, Simon is definitely the outsider, but Zoe learns from him. It's the same with Puck and Hush. The alien helps Puck to come to terms with herself. I call it my outsider-as-catalyst theory." Klause does not start out with theme or message, though; it grows naturally out of the story. "You can't force the theme," Klause said. "It has to come naturally. Because of my background as the odd kid out in England and a foreigner in the United States, I find I often deal with the positive aspects of difference. Different is good. People contribute to life and society in different ways, but everybody has something to contribute."

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