Ransom Riggs never imagined he’d become a star of the YA scene. He hadn’t even intended to be an author. While he’d always loved reading and writing stories as a kid, Riggs had been starting his career as a filmmaker when he was inspired to write a book based on the vintage photographs he started collecting as a kid in Florida.
“My grandmother used to take me to these secondhand stores and garage sales and stuff, and I’d be like, that’s so interesting – a shoebox of dead people’s photos,” he says over Zoom from the US.
“I was 12 and the sort of ... sadness of it didn’t hit me until later. And then, I sort of felt like these abandoned photos had outlived their context and perhaps I can give them a new one.”
The “peculiars” from Tim Burton’s 2016 film adaptation of Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.Credit: AP
He resurrected his hobby when he moved to California as an adult, being particularly drawn to eerie black-and-white photos – children in Victorian-era clothing, twins wearing homemade Halloween costumes, a sad-looking boy holding two porcelain dolls among his extensive collection – and when an editor asked him if he had any ideas, he toyed with a coffee-table picture book.
But his editor suggested his creepy collection, particularly the shots of children, might work as a novel.
“I’d always had the idea of an island full of children, who have … not exactly powers, and not exactly curses, but I didn’t really know what the way into that story was,” Riggs says of what would become 2011’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The “peculiars” in Miss Peregrine’s were inspired by his photographs, which also appeared in the book that became an instant bestseller. It spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, went on to sell more than 10 million copies, and was translated into more than 40 languages.
Riggs has been expanding the gothic world of Miss Peregrine for more than 13 years now (it was adapted into a film by Tim Burton in 2016), with a loyal fan base that eagerly follows each new book in the series.
But for a long time, Riggs had another fantastical tale bubbling away; the first instalment is published this month.
(Hardcore Peregrine fans will be pleased though, that Riggs says he’s not 100 per cent sure he’s done with it forever: “I was sad to say goodbye, but … it keeps calling to me.”)
Miss Peregrine was inspired by real photographs and his new series is also partly reality-based, drawing on aspects of his hometown of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife Tahereh Mafi – also a bestselling YA author – and their daughter.
Sunderworld Vol 1: The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry follows 17-year-old Leopold, who lives with his overbearing father in LA, after the death of his mother several years earlier. After his mum died, Leopold found a box of old VHS tapes of a 1990s fantasy show called Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld, which he became obsessed with, watching it over and over.
He and his best friend Emmett would dress up as the characters and recreate the show; losing himself in this fictional world was a coping mechanism during his grief. But when Leopold began seeing strange things that happened in Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld in real life, everyone told him it was a way of processing his trauma. Leopold accepted that and packed away his tapes.
But years later, on the verge of finishing high school and under pressure from his father about college choices, the mind-bending visions have returned. A mechanical raccoon with a fiery tail seems to be following him; he watches as a man inserts a tooth into a parking meter.
Leopold wonders if he’s losing his mind – until it becomes clear that the Sunderworld of the TV show is, in fact, a real place; a sort of alternate Los Angeles that can only be accessed by certain people.
As well as a quirky, antihero’s coming-of-age story, Sunderworld is also something of a love letter to a Los Angeles of the recent past.
The Angels Flight funicular in LA’s Bunker Hill district is one of the real settings in Riggs’ new book.Credit: Getty Images
“I’ve always considered Los Angeles to be the most peculiar place in the world – far stranger than London, stranger than a craggy island off the coast of Wales,” Riggs says, referring to his Miss Peregrine settings.
“I’ve lived here for more than 20 years and I’ve been fascinated by and seeking out the weird, gritty magic of its nooks and crannies for years. I wanted a book where I could write its magic into the pages and … explore what lies beneath the veil.”
Even the most bizarre settings in Sunderworld, such as the 1950s diner replete with animatronic animals, come from real life.
“Emmet has a line – ‘I love this beautiful, disgusting city’ – and that’s how I feel, really,” Riggs explains. “So a lot of the locations are real. The Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the vegan noise band bar The Stench is a real place, although it’s called The Smell.”
An old funicular that Leopold and Emmet use to travel to Sunderworld is based on the real narrow-gauge railway, Angels Flight, in downtown LA’s Bunker Hill district. “All these things are the magic of LA that I wanted to dig into and uncover.”
The fictional TV show at the centre of the book is based on an “amalgam” of kids’ programs from the ’90s, but Riggs was also partly inspired by classic 1980s films, such as Gremlins and Back to the Future.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO RANSOM RIGGS
- Worst habit? Overthinking some things and underthinking others. I still have trouble with average-height thinking.
- Greatest fear? Missing the best days of my life as I’m living them.
- The line that stayed with you? “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” (From Back to the Future)
- Biggest regret? Biggest regret, Aussie edition: that time a friend and I tried to drive a rented Skoda into the outback with no plan.
- Favourite book? All-time fave: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? Back to my 20s, which I’d live with the wisdom of someone in his 40s.
“I love those what-if scenarios, those light sci-fi adventure movies,” he says.
Many of the book’s set pieces have a decidedly retro feel, too – no surprise to learn, then, that Riggs is a fan of analogue technology. He’s heartened to see a nostalgic resurgence of things such as cassette Walkmans and analogue cameras, even among people who didn’t live through their eras.
“I think the digital world is so relentless and overwhelming that even people who weren’t around for these older technologies reach for them, it’s like (they’re) just looking to gasp: ‘I just need a break. I want something that’s not watching me and tracking me and always flipping to the next thing.’”
Everyone is always looking for meaning, but Riggs says: “If it’s just an algorithm burrowing into our brains, it’s meaningless. Older technologies feel like they have a soul, but the internet doesn’t have a soul.”
Algorithms that tailor what they think you want to watch or listen to are “siloing” us, he adds. “I can go off for a long time, but yeah … I’ve always been drawn to older technologies.”
If you’ve ever ordered a book through your Kindle, you’ll know it happens there, too – especially in the “young adult” category. Download one and the algorithm will instantly assume you are an adolescent.
But Riggs, as with other authors whose books are marketed toward older YA readers, has many adult readers.
“I have a pretty wide swath of people, but plenty of teenagers – and readers who were teenagers 10 years ago when they started reading my books,” Riggs says.
“But it seems, arbitrarily, people decide that novels about young people that are fancy and have great literary merit as judged by the ‘world at large’ are sent out of YA. But I think YA is a pretty big tent.”
He accepts that there will always be some who remain sniffy about the genre.
“The line has always felt really grey as to what is defined as YA and what is not,” he adds. “I mean, Catcher in the Rye is a YA novel.”
Sunderworld Vol 1: The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
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