Darren Shan's Blog, page 5

Blurbal Reasoning manga vol 5 review

Vlogger BLURBAL REASONING recently reviewed the fifth volume of the Cirque Du Freak manga adaptation. It's a 16 minute review that goes into quite a lot of interesting detail, and is certainly worth checking out, which you can do by clicking on the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDLU7... If you've never read the CDF manga (or even heard about it!), all 12 books were adapted many years ago, first in Japan, then in translated editions in lots of other countries around the w...

10 great horror books… 10 terrible movies?!?

SCREEN RANT posted a feature some time ago, entitled TEN GREAT HORROR BOOKS THAT MADE FOR TERRIBLE MOVIES. No prizes for guessing which books featured in the #4 slot!!! You can check out the full list here: https://screenrant.com/great-horror-b... As I almost always state when the subject of the Cirque Du Freak movie is broached... I had nothing to do with the film... I do wish it had been more faithful to my books, and a lot da...

Potter and YA in the noughties

There was an interesting article on COURAGEOUS NERD a while back (OK -- quite a long time back! July last year in fact!!), looking at YA fiction of the early noughties, and how the Harry Potter books changed the YA world and paved the way for other authors to follow in its slipstream. You can check it out by clicking on the following link: https://courageousnerd.com/2023/07/31... In the author's summary at the end of the article, he sta...

The Belgariad influence

A fan of mine called JAY emailed me recently to say: "I’ve just started reading The Belgariad series and saw your quote in the front of the book. I’ve been a massive fan of your books for some time and wondered if anything from this series has helped inspire your work. I saw some parallels in Belgarath and Beranabus and wanted to see if it was a little Easter egg!" Jay was partly right about the Belgariad easter egg, but got the wrong book and characters! While Belgarath might have been ...

Archibald Lox Vol 1 Kobo sale

To tie in with a Kobo promotional sale, for the entire month of August, the eBook of Volume One of my Archibald Lox series will be reduced to just $0.99!!! It will be a similar low price around the world, and just £0.99 in the UK, and €0.99 in European territories. If you haven't yet read the book, or read it but don't own a copy, or want to recommend it to a friend or loved one, this is the perfect time to grab Volume One at a bargain basement price!! It collects the first three books of the se...

Terrified Troll - release date update

When I announced last year that I was going to be releasing my first ever children's picture book, The Terrified Troll, with artist Eva Byrne, I said that we were hoping to release it before the end of summer 2024, but "our time scale MIGHT prove to be overly optimistic." That, alas, has turned out to be the case. We haven't actually run into any external bumps, such as sickness or accidents (touch wood!!), but it has been a much steeper learning curve than we'd anticipated. For instance, we sta...

Tattoo Tuesday - Demi

I've another TATTOO TUESDAY post for you all, and today's corker was shared with us by a Shanster called DEMI. Demi wrote to me a while back, saying she wanted to get a tattoo of her favourite quote of mine -- "Even in death may I be triumhant." Demi's not alone in favouring that particular quote, and many fans have adopted it for tattoos -- but Demi wanted to know if it might be possible to have it done in MY handwriting. While I don't have very neat handwriting (I was always being crit...

Hungary beckons!

I'll be making a rare public appearance in Budapest, Hungary on Saturday August 24th. I'll be giving a talk and answering questions from those in attendance, then signing books and posing for photos. It's been a long time since my last event in Hungary, and I haven't been doing many events anywhere over the last several years, so if you live in Hungary and miss this one, it might be a long time before you get a chance to catch me again!! I won't be the only author at the event -- there will ...

Ireland 1600 years ago

A fan on Facebook asked where my book Bec was set, He thought Ireland, but when one of the characters talked about making a march on foot of 8 or 9 days, he started doubting himself, as he felt Ireland was too small a country for such a long march, and that you could cross the whole place in just 2 or 3 days... I can confirm that Bec IS set in Celtic Ireland. If the country seems a bit larger than our current geographical mindset would suggest, it's worth bearing in mind that they didn't hav...

A short delay

OK folks, this is a mixed news post -- potentially good long-term news, but mixed in with some short-term bum notes!! So, I was planning to surprise you all in October with a new Darren Shan book. It's a short horror novel that I wrote several years ago. My agent at the time presented it to my publishers, but they weren't interested in it, so I put it aside for a while, before returning to it this year to polish it up and get it ready for self-publication -- I felt there'd been a long enough...