Mike Ford on Eerie Indiana and Frightsville

[froodle]

Today we are delighted to welcome Mike Ford to Ginger Nuts of Horror in a wide ranging interview which covers publishing, writing for Scholastic, YA horror, pseudonyms, Shirley Jackson Award nominations, book agents, Indiana Eerie (who remembers that cool show?) and his latest middle grade series Frightville of which four titles have been released over the last few months. Mike writes across the board and is equally comfortable and skilled penning for adults as he is for teens and the younger middle grade age group. His back-catalogue is both vast and varied; labelling him a horror writer does not do justice as his outstanding body of work includes non-fiction and non-genre fiction.

You seemed to have ‘retired’ Mike Ford in 1998 after writing ten of the ‘Eerie Indiana’ novels. That show lasted one season in the early nineties, I had never heard of it as a book series and was surprised it was deemed successful enough to be novelised, can you tell us a little bit about it?

One day my editor at Avon called me and she was in a mood. The company had recently been acquired by a larger media company that owned television properties, and they were pressuring the publishing division to come up with books based on some of these series. She said, “I have to do a series based on this show no one has ever heard of, called Eerie, Indiana.” I said, “That’s one of my favourite shows!” and proceeded to talk about the various plots and how great they were. She signed me up immediately, mostly because she was so relieved that I was already familiar with the characters and the peculiar quality of the show. It was supposed to be a huge deal, because they were rebooting the show with new actors and bringing it back. There were all of these product tie-ins and plans for marketing, my favourite being for a line of canned pasta. Then the reboot flopped and nothing ever came of the marketing plans. Those are actually some of my very favourite books that I’ve written, so it was disappointing to see the series not do well. I would have happily written a dozen more of them.

[ED: The Rebooted show was called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension] (1998) and one of Mike’s books The Dollhouse that Time Forgot (Eerie Indiana #11) was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the category - Works for Young Readers).

Mike, Michael, and Isobel it has been an absolute pleasure featuring you on the site. Many of us who watched the original Indiana Eerie show have similar nostalgia for it! Good luck with your future projects and we hope ‘Frightville’ is resurrected for your planned books 5-8 and that somebody much more influential than us namechecks ‘Lily’ and it goes on to be a surprise international bestseller!