This One’s for the Normals: A Guest Post by Ransom Riggs
Have you ever longed to get our of your hometown and find magic in a far-away place? Ransom Riggs has, and he turned those feelings into incredible books. In his latest, The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry, Riggs introduces us to a brand-new world. Read on for his exclusive guest post on what inspired this story and what he hopes readers take away from it.
Hardcover $21.99
Sunderworld, Vol. I (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition): The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry
Sunderworld, Vol. I (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition): The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry
By Ransom Riggs
In Stock Online
Hardcover $21.99
Ransom Riggs is as enjoyable as ever with this fantastical and quirky new world that’s an ode to Hollywood, memory and imagination. And remember: Never underestimate the power of nostalgia — or a cursed VHS tape.
Ransom Riggs is as enjoyable as ever with this fantastical and quirky new world that’s an ode to Hollywood, memory and imagination. And remember: Never underestimate the power of nostalgia — or a cursed VHS tape.
I get a lot of my inspiration from the places I live. My first book series, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, was partly inspired by my childhood in hot, stifling, suburban Florida—an unmagical place if there ever was one. I grew up dreaming of an escape to some fantastical, uncanny Elsewhere; someplace impossible-seeming things might be possible. With no access to a wormhole or magical wardrobe, that Elsewhere was books, and portal fantasies in particular, which seemed to infuse the stultifying suburbs around me with magic. Sunderworld, on the other hand, was inspired by my fascination with Los Angeles, which has been my adopted home for the past few decades. A deeply peculiar city that’s just shot through with what seems like obvious, almost hit-you-over-the-head magic—magic leaking out of the giant cracks in the sidewalks, wedged into unglamorous strip malls, hidden everywhere in plain sight, so much a part of the landscape that it fades into the everyday, and we Angelenos hardly notice.
I moved to LA in 2002 to go to film school (which was as close to magic school as I could get). The city felt vast and intimidating. There were no maps on your phone in those ancient days; everyone clung to these paper street atlases called Thomas Guides, and keeping one in your car in case you got lost was practically a matter of life and death.
I got lost a lot.
That was how I stumbled upon all manner of strange, potentially magical places, many of which are woven into the Elsewhere Leopold Berry discovers in Sunderworld. Clifton’s Cafeteria, this crumbling 1930s eatery in a gritty section of downtown, was one such Elsewhere. It was Disneyland before the Magic Kingdom was even a twinkle in Walt’s eye: a redwood forest-themed restaurant with chlorinated creeks that actually flowed, fake trees made of pipe cleaners that brushed the three-story ceiling, and animatronic animals that squeaked and screeched as they sprung out from bushes at you. A run-down firetrap when I stumbled across it, the place was brimming with creaky, creepy atmosphere—and, I was sure, secret rooms, secret doors, perhaps even secret worlds. In Sunderworld, it really is, and Clifton’s becomes a portal of sorts.
In the later Miss Peregrine books, I brought my characters to America, and with each installment the peculiar kids discover progressively more peculiar parts of the United States. I was sorely tempted to locate one of their time loops in Los Angeles—but when I really got down to it, the city was almost too peculiar for Miss Peregrine. The books didn’t need LA’s gritty brand of magic. Instead, I’ve been saving LA for something special. Something even more peculiar than Miss Peregrine. For Sunderworld.
Suffice to say, as a lover of both portal fantasy and the many weirdnesses of LA, writing a magical world into the nooks and crannies of my city has been—and, as I pen the sequels, continues to be—immense fun. (Finally, an excuse to render the 50-foot-tall ballerina clown statue at the corner of Main Street and Rose in fiction!) But the part of The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry of which I’m proudest is Leopold himself. The real story of Sunderworld is Leopold’s journey from being someone who uses fantasy to hide from reality to someone who faces hard, unpleasant realities head-on.
With this book, I wanted to remind the reader, as I often had to remind my younger self, that you can’t wait for the world to choose you. No one believes in Leopold: not his dad, not his friends, not the magically-inclined denizens of Sunder he meets along the way. Hell, even Leopold doesn’t particularly believe in Leopold. But in the end, he has to let go of his fantasy and embrace reality—even if it means failing spectacularly in the process.
Miss Peregrine was for the peculiar kids. This one’s for the normals, the absolutely average ones, the nothing-specials. The rest of us. Because if no one’s going to believe in you, if no one’s going to choose you, you’ve got to choose yourself.
I hope you lose yourself in Sunderworld as thoroughly as I did.
