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One of my favourite Xmas gifts!
So happy I get to continue my babies adventures in these awesome books and especially this amazing festive edition ( published in 1999 )🖤 🎀☠️
(900th post✨)

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13: Switching Channels

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!

I totally enjoyed this Eerie Indiana story. It would have been a really good episode. I would have loved to see Syndi turning into a plant while getting ready for the beauty pageant.

When Sofia buys a cool skeleton key from a creepy store, Frightville, it quickly becomes her favorite possession. It seems to open any lock she tries it on - even the rusted old lock on the attic in her new house.

But opening that door seems to have magically opened a door into the past. A past that Sofia starts to think should have stayed locked up.

About the Author

Mike Ford is the author of numerous spooky books, including titles in the Eerie, Indiana and Spinetinglers series. He started writing about haunted things after growing up in a house full of ghosts who wanted him to tell them bedtime stories.

Welcome to Frightville... one-stop shopping for all your fears!

Frightville is a store with a toy for anyone's wish list. Or so it seems. . .

David's new chattering teeth toy was advertised as a Wish Eater: "Able to grant any wish!" But after annoying siblings are wished away, can they be wished back?

Mike Ford is the author of numerous spooky books, including titles in the Eerie, Indiana and Spinetinglers series. He started writing about haunted things after growing up in a house full of ghosts who wanted him to tell them bedtime stories.

This is just a crossover between Just Say No Fun and Who's Who, right?

Hey there, anyone has Michael Thomas Ford - Who Framed Alice Prophet?, searched all the web couldn't find anywhere.

In 1997, Eerie, Indiana the Book Series, was a short-lived continuation of the original supernatural series of the same name that aired on NBC over half a decade before it. It was a Children's Literature series released on a monthly basis with each entry clocking in at around 120 pages, similar to the ever-popular Goosebumps. The series followed the new adventures of Marshall Teller and Simon Holmes for the first 12 entries, detailing the exploits of Marshall, a transplant from New Jersey whose family has moved to the small town of Eerie, and Simon, an Eerie native, as they investigate the weirdness that inhabits this town. As the other residents are oblivious to the supernatural nature of the town to the point of denial, Marshall and Simon are left to their own devices to uncover the truth behind both the individual happenings around Eerie, and the secret behind it all. They deal with everything from escaped wild west criminals from cryogenic storage to Bigfoot eating out of the trash.

Then, as of Book 13, Switching Channels, Mitchell Taylor and Stanley Hope of Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension fame took over as the main characters following both a dimensional and perspective shift. This lasted a further seven books before getting canned in the final entry, We Wish You an Eerie Christmas.

Allegedly, these books is set a mere one year after the end of the original series, which should make the present year 1993. However, the authors opted to make it the present year of the time, 1997. This isn't the last time they'd play fast and loose with the continuity of the TV show. Authors Mike Ford, John Peel, Jeremy Roberts, Sherry Shahan, and Robert James decided to make the series their own and tell their own overarching story, instead of continuing down the rabbit hole set by the original's creators.

There were 17 books in total over the course of the series' run:

Return to Foreverware
Bureau of Lost
The Eerie Triangle
Simon and Marshall's Excellent Adventure
Have Yourself an Eerie Christmas
Fountain of Weird
Attack of the Two-Ton Tomatoes
Who Framed Alice Prophet
Bring Me a Dream
Finger Lickin' Strange
The Dollhouse That Time Forgot
They Say
Switching Channels
The Incredible Shrinking Stanley
Halloweird
Eerie in the Mirror
We Wish You an Eerie Christmas
This series contains examples of:
Actor Allusion: Several, but some specific examples are:
Mr. Radford (played by John Astin in the TV series), is noted to look like Gomez Addams by Marshall and Simon.
In the first book, Return to Foreverware, Marshall and Simon take an after school job cleaning out the attic of a couple by the name of James and Martha Stewart.
Adults Are Useless: Taken to further extremes here than it ever did on TV. The adults and most of the children of Eerie are so oblivious or in denial that the entire town can start slowly turning into humanoid plants and they wouldn't notice.
Call-Back: Both of the first two books are sequels to episodes from the original series.
Rather fittingly, in keeping with Foreverware being the first episode of the TV show, Return to Foreverware begins the books series.
And Bureau of Lost is a sequel to The Losers.
Shout-Out: In the 4th book, Marshall's class gets a new student named Jazon, who is temporarily living in town with his grandfather, Dr. Foreman. It turns out Jazon's a time travel living in town under false pretenses, to boot. And his home is even disguised as a blue box. Though, since this is America, the only available blue boxes are outhouses, unfortunately.

Halloween is almost here and my kids and I are super excited since it is our favorite holiday. In spirit of this spooky holiday, all month I will be reviewing creepy books with the first one being Return to Foreverware, the first book in the Eerie Indiana series.

Do you guys remember watching “Eerie Indiana” as a kid? If you don’t, think of it as basically “The Twilight Zone”, for children. It is not overly scary and is can be quite funny at times.

My kids love watching the reruns on Netflix streaming and I am pretty sure this summer for about a month, it was their sole reason for living. “Eerie Indiana” has two main characters, one being a boy named Marshall Teller who has moved from New Jersey to Eerie and his sidekick, Simon. In the television program, they solve all the strange occurrences in their “normal” town.

Mike Ford has done an incredible job retelling in Return to Foreverware, his first book based on the series. The characters are still very weird and he does an excellent job of repeating everything that the television episode covered.

I love that he has written about the town by bringing Marshall Teller back in a different medium, but am disappointed that he has not taken the characters in his own direction to find other adventures and unravel other mysteries in this curious town.

Still, my daughters love this book, which is about a family who has stayed young by sleeping in powerful, preserving Tupperware-like storage containers. When the matriarch of the family keeps her twins sons at a middle school age for decades, they reach out to Marshall for help. He pops open their containers after bedtime and they in turn pop open their mothers.

By morning, they all look like they have had a peek in the Ark of the Covenant from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the boys are now middle aged men.

Buy this book HERE from Amazon in time for Halloween! AND if you have never seen Eerie Indiana, check this series out on Netflix instant streaming. Look hard and you will even spot a young Toby Maguire in one of the episodes!

Work for Young Readers:

"Bigger than Death" by Nancy Etchemendy, Winner
The Dollhouse that Time Forgot (Eerie Indiana #11) by Mike Ford
The Angel Chronicles: A Novelization (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Vol. 1) by Nancy Holder
Hungry Ghosts: A Novelization (The X-Files No. 9) by Ellen Steiber

I love that behind the ripped-effect cover there's a blue embossed card page saying "do not break this seal".

The Eerie, Indiana books are based on the characters from the television show of the same name. One day my editor called me and said, "We're doing these books based on this TV show, but none of the writers we know have ever heard of it." When she told me what it was, they probably heard me scream in space. I loved the show. And that's how I got the job. There are 17 titles in the series, of which I wrote 9. The book THE DOLLHOUSE THAT TIME FORGOT was a finalist for the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award in the category of Work for Young Readers. The books are currently not available, which makes me sad. I'm also sad that the TV show isn't on anymore.

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