'Master of horror' Darren Shan on writing his first picture book for children

HAVING made his name as a master of horror writing for teens and adults the world over, Darren Shan is now tackling his most fiendish challenge yet - a terrified little troll.

The best-selling author of the Demonata and Zom-B series, and the massively successful Saga of Darren Shan (adapted both as a manga series and a film) has teamed up with emerging artist Eva Byrne to create a picture book, about a young troll who flees from the James Whale Night School for the Universally Gifted, and seeks places to hide in its home town, in the dark. What has scared the little monster so much?

The Terrified Troll, set to be a 32-page picture book, is being crowd-funded by the pair on Indiegogo and is based on a poem written by Darren many years ago about his son, Dante.

“When my son was very young, he kept putting stones in his mouth and chewing them,” Darren explains.

“And one day, I just had this idea for a line, I thought it might be a poem — ‘My son is a troll. He loves eating stones’ — and it stuck in my head. I ended up not doing anything with it, he got a bit older and it slid into the background.

“Then my daughter, Gaia wasn't as big into it but she still once or twice would pick up a stone and start chewing on it. That brought me back to the idea, and I just thought, let me try and do something with this.”

After working this idea into a poem first and then a story, Darren began looking for an artist to collaborate with to turn it into a picture book.

“I'd always been keen to try my hand at a picture book, and this seemed like the perfect time to give it a go.”

In 2021, he turned to Eva, a printmaker and artist based in his native west Limerick. The two had met about six years ago through Darren’s wife Bas, who Eva had become great friends with at their local Mother and Toddler Club.

“Darren asked me if I'd like to work with him on an idea he had for a picture book,” Eva explains, as we chat over a Zoom call, with both Eva and Darren sharing a screen from his front room of his Pallaskenry, Co Limerick home. 

“As soon as I read the poem about a troll, I just fell in love with it,” she continues.

“With my work in the past, I'm really interested in character drawing and building characters, and especially magical little beings. So I was super excited.”

Darren and Eva are still very much finding their way with the project, as this is the first picture book either have ever worked on. “We've had a few drafts of styles for the book,” Eva says.

“And the troll has definitely evolved a lot.”

The pair have developed an incredibly collaborative workflow, with Eva producing a story-board in sketchbook form, based on Darren's original story.

“It's been a real fun exploration process figuring out what the structure will be, it's still very fluid,” says Darren.

“Very often a picture book is done to a certain formula,” he continues.

“And we're not doing that, there is no formula here. We're out there exploring and bouncing ideas off each other, it's exciting, and terrifying. We're the terrified Darren and Eva!”

This experimental style of working is part of the reason they have chosen to self-publish The Terrified Troll.

“We don't have the pressure of constantly having to relay our ideas, every step of the way to a big publisher, and it's given us a lot more freedom to be very experimental with how we want the book to look,” says Eva.

It's also allowed them to introduce a little darkness into the story that a traditional children's book publisher may not have allowed.

A very early draft, written by Darren from the troll's fathers point-of-view, ended with the father acknowledging that their son was likely to eat his parents.

“The whole key of the book is acceptance, that no matter what you do your parents will love you,” Darren says.

“It's going to be a very sweet book, but with a bit of an edge to it.”

However, Eva has an enthusiastic young test audience in her own two young daughters, Polly (6) and Goldie (5), who particularly helped with the design for a little banshee character.

“Traditionally the banshee is terrifying, no one's ever seen her but we all know what she sounds like,” says Eva.

“I was showing the girls drawings as I went, because I wanted to draw a nice balance of a bit spooky but not totally terrifying.”

Another major reason for choosing to fund the book through Indiegogo, according to Darren, is that traditional publishers were cautious about working with two people who had never written or drawn a picture book before: “We weren’t a sure bet,” he explains.

The Indiegogo campaign, running until the end of November 2023, will fund a print run based entirely on pre-orders through the campaign, with many options for contributors to choose from, from stickers to signed copies to exclusive meetings with Darren.

All going to plan, The Terrified Troll will be published sometime next year. 

Click here to contribute to the Indiegogo campaign and get your copy.