Six kids are hired to run a paper route in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They are tasked with garnering as many subscriptions as possible with the prize of $20 going to the person who gets the most new customers. There’s more to the neighborhood than what meets the eye, though. Monsters threaten to take over this community, which leads the kids to fight battles they didn’t know existed.
Dan Kois creates quite the storyline in his book, Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He recently sat down with WPR’s BETA to talk about his new novel.
“I did have an experience similar to this, though without the supernatural creatures,” Kois said when asked about the inspiration behind his story. “When I was 12, I might as well have met witches and trolls and werewolves and vampires. I was also a Milwaukee Sentinel paperboy when I was growing up. It was my first job.”
Although the supernatural element present in Hampton Heights was absent in Dan’s true story of being a paper boy, they are prevalent in his tale and make the reader wonder if the kids will be alright.
“I love making sure everyone knows before they start this book that at the end of the book, the kids are fine and they go to Burger King,” Kois shared with BETA. “That’s important to me,” he added.
“Part of it is because I’m a parent. And as happens with many parents — though not all — the instant I had kids, I immediately lost all taste for any story in which a kid dies. That makes such stories radioactive as far as I’m concerned.”
Still, the author wants readers to become acquainted with the challenges the kids face.
“I liked the idea of a story in which the kids are in peril in some way and they face challenges,” Kois shared during his interview with the press. “But what you’re going through as a reader is not the kind of prototypical horror experience of waiting for the author to punish them in some unique, shocking, surprising, or delightful way,” Dan revealed.
“I wanted the sort of unbelievable creativity in this book to come out of the ways that kids find to escape these experiences, that the innovation and ingenuity that they show are in growing up over the course of this night to becoming the kinds of kids who can get out of circumstances like this.”
Get your copy of Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin here!
Photo: Alia Smith