The book that changed my life wasn’t Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies or any of the classics that are supposed to have an effect on a young man. It wasn’t even The Chocolate War, though I do love that book and all of Robert Cormier’s work. The book that changed my life was one that I’ve never seen on any school reading list. I can’t even find it in a bookstore these days. It’s called Eyes of the Tarot and it was written by Bruce Coville.

The story follows a girl named Bonnie who stumbles upon an ancient pack of tarot cards with a mysterious connection to her family. Bonnie immediately understands how to read these cards and becomes consumed by her newfound ability to foretell the future… “even if it means facing a horror beyond death itself…” I know, right? Pretty awesome.

I devoured this book. Decades later I still recall the sensation of sitting on my grandparents’ couch on a sunny afternoon completely enthralled. I was already an avid reader. I’d solved mysteries with Encyclopedia Brown, stalked the celery at midnight with Bunnicula, and commiserated with the Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. But this was different. I was voracious for this young adult book set in that exciting age I was approaching at roller coaster speed. For a sheltered kid with a father who didn’t want him on a ride as dangerous as a Ferris wheel stories with teenage characters fighting demons and monsters was exactly the kind of excitement I craved.

Up until then, I couldn’t sit through Halloween. Didn’t even attempt Poltergeist. Jaws was manageable, but I can’t tell you the number of nights I spent trying to convince myself that there was no way a shark could attack me in bed a hundred miles from the ocean. Even Ghostbusters gave me nightmares. But there was something about Eyes of the Tarot that inspired my imagination without overwhelming it. Reading the story allowed me to control the horrors in my mind’s eye. Please don’t think it was about the search for depth in genre fiction that used figurative monsters to expose ugly truths in the human condition. These were not those kinds of books. I was in it purely for the adrenaline rush.

Another draw of the book was that it was part of a series. Eyes of the Tarot was book 9 in a collection of Bantam books called Dark Forces. Different writers wrote the various books in the series. The books were not linked in any way beyond the subject matter. They didn’t need to be read in order, but most conveniently had a number on the spine so I knew what was missing from my collection. The series was similar in concept to the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies I would contribute to decades later (minus the numbers on the spines).

I can’t properly explain the disappointment I felt when I saw book 15 on store shelves and came to the slow realization that no matter where I looked I would never find 16. This was long before the internet where a simple Google search would tell me that my passion had come to an end.

Getting these books replaced collecting Star Wars action figures in my life. I was no longer visiting the toy store with pockets empty just so I could plot out which figure to buy with my next allowance. My new toy store was Waldenbooks and each week brought a new kind of figure with imagination-action and edge-of-my-seat grip. Did Swamp Witch look scarier than The Ashton Horror? Did I want to read about a rock band that sold their souls to the devil or a gymnastic cult of impossibly attractive teens? What kind of horrors did these characters have in store for them? What kind of excitement did these writers hold for me?

Not only did these books inspire my reading, they inspired my writing. They made me want to write. They made me want to write for teens, because these were the exciting characters to write about.

In ninth grade my English teacher gave the class the most incredible assignment ever: to make a book. We were to come up with the story, write it, and bind it together in cardboard covers decorated with contact paper so that we each had our own hand-crafted work. I wrote a horror story about a group of kids terrorized by a demon in the New Jersey beach community (a.k.a. The Jersey Shore) where I most feared running into the shark from Jaws. When it came time to bind the book, I was the only kid in the class that cut up a manila file folder instead of cardboard. To me, books weren’t hardcover. They were paperbacks.

Here I am writing that book. My first book.

From the Dark Forces books I moved onto Christopher Pike and then grew into Dean R. Koontz (he’s since dropped the “R”) and Anne Rice. Each step an evolution of the person I was becoming. But it wasn’t just about horror. The subject matter grew into fantasy and action, techno-thrillers and mysteries. Stories about lives so much more thrilling than mine. Genres that had their own sections in the bookstore beyond just “fiction” or “literature.”

I admit, I became a bit of a mass market snob. That’s harder to be these days since the mass market has changed so much in the past decade. Unlike literary snobs, I don’t judge the books that others choose to read. I also don’t rush out to buy the next great work of literary genius. But I would never think less of a person who gravitates towards books that challenge the intellect. Just don’t try to engage me in a conversation over the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light. I’ll most likely annoy you by saying that I believe Daisy just ran out of bulbs and stuck a Christmas light in there until she could find a replacement.