It’s officially debut year (eep!), and I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected to be part of this year’s writers’ Debutante Ball! For those unfamiliar, since 2007 the Deb Ball has featured small cohorts of female-identifying debut authors as they enter the metaphorical publishing dance floor for the first time. Not gonna lie—it’s pretty neat, at almost-37-years-of-age (my birthday’s tomorrow!), to be having the “debutante” experience my nerdy teen self never did. (Yes, I was in a middle school junior-sorority program that would’ve culminated in a debutante ball but that I instead quit, much to my mother’s chagrin. Yes, I also did college sorority rush, only—embarrassingly—not to be chosen by anybody. Yes, these things were absolutely for the best...and now I get to have a bookish kind of debut instead!) Check out our Substack and Instagram—and be on the look-out for the first of our cohort, Samantha Chong’s Prodigal Tiger, releasing March 17th!

Also, also, also! Keep your eyes peeled in mid-March for the cover reveal for THE BONE BRIDES! The cover is simply stunning—a true piece of art that goes so far above and beyond anything I could possibly have imagined—and I cannot wait to share it with you all. Moreover, I’ve just learned that the first print run will feature limited edition stenciled/sprayed edges!! Get hyped!

I had already half-written this newsletter, musing on the changing of the seasons (yadda, yadda) and how the promise of summer’s possibilities is laid into our bones by our time as school-children (yadda, yadda), when I was hanging out with my friend Supriya and found myself, as I often do, singing “It’s Terror Time Again.” Supi wasn’t familiar with it.

“From Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island!”

“Okay.”

“Which is a brilliant movie, actually.”

“Okay.”

“No, really—”

Gentle readers, you now know whom to thank for the fact that I will not this month be musing on the changing of the seasons but will instead be waving wildly at you from atop my soapbox while explaining WHY SCOOBY-DOO ON ZOMBIE ISLAND IS A BRILLIANT MOVIE, ACTUALLY, like the very normal human being that I am.

As a disclaimer, I should begin by saying that I have always loved Scooby-Doo. It satisfied my child-self’s itch for the spooky while promising that scary things would never be as scary as they seemed. Like Scoob, I was easily frightened yet perpetually pulled to what scared me, obsessively poring—for example—over the back covers of Goosebumps books in my school library at lunch, though I knew I would never actually have the courage to read any of them. I also happened to be exactly the right age when Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island came out: old enough not to be scared by it...but also young enough that, yeah, I was a little scared. Lying on my friend’s bedroom floor that night, I did have a hard time sleeping. This was not the Scooby-Doo I knew.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the idea of “the promise of the premise.” In its most stripped down sense, it refers to the idea that a story must fulfill whatever expectations its premise has set up for its audience. For three decades, Scoody-Doo had made its viewers the same promise with the same premise: there will be a ghost, monster, or other such bogeyman, but upon investigation, the supernatural will be revealed to be nothing more than a bad guy using costumes or other fakery to cover up their bad guy-ish deeds. Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island takes this seemingly immutable premise—along with 30 years of viewers’ expectations—and turns it on its undead head.

What if, the movie asks, this time, the monsters are real?++

From the beginning, Zombie Island establishes that not only it but its characters have moved on from the premise of yore. The gang, bored of the never-ending procession of bad-guys-in-masks, have gone their separate ways. Daphne, however, is now a television host and determined to find a real haunting for her show. As a surprise for her, Fred does a good ol’ Get the Gang Back Together, and everyone sets out together for Louisiana, where they meet an attractive young woman who claims to work at a real haunted house, so the gang follows her to a pepper plantation on an island in the bayou purportedly haunted by the pirate Morgan Moonscar. There, they almost immediately are met with ghostly messages telling them to “Get Out” and “Beware.” It’s stuff they (and we) have seen a million times. That is, until about halfway through the film, when—in a memorable scene involving Fred yanking off a zombie’s head while trying to prove it’s wearing a mask—the gang discovers that the zombies roaming Moonscar Island are real.

This alone would have been a clever move, and the film’s marketing team knew as much. “This time, the monsters are real!” was the centerpiece of its ad campaign, establishing the new premise it hoped to use to draw viewers in. But Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is not just a clever movie. It is a brilliant movie.

Spoilers ahead!

In the movie’s final act, we learn that our attractive young woman, Lena, and her employer, Simone, are in fact 200 years old—a feat accomplished by draining the life force from people lured to their island every harvest moon. The zombies (who, throughout the film, have featured not just pirates but Civil War soldiers, men in 20s business suits, and modern-day tourists—a detail in no way hidden but whose significance I’m betting most watchers don’t clock until the reveal) weren’t trying to threaten the gang but to warn them. Thus, the movie not only takes Scooby-Doo’s eternal premise—that the monsters are actually bad guys in masks—and turns it on its head once, but does so a second time by having the monsters—these oh so real monsters—not be bad guys at all.

To add a final layer, even our actual bad guys, Lena and Simone, are victims of a sort. Their life-draining powers began as revenge taken against Morgan Moonscar’s pirates after the pirates killed the rest of their community. Lena and Simone found out only after having cursed the pirates to eternity as zombies that they had cursed themselves as well. “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves,” as they+++ say.

So what is the lesson here for writers? First, that while there may only be so many “original” plots out there—we’ve all heard that nothing is ever really new—it is nonetheless always possible to innovate. In fact, innovation on something tried-and-true can be more exciting than something wholly never-before-seen. We know Scooby-Doo. We know the promise of that premise. We love having that expectation fulfilled (Zombie Island is still Scooby-Doo, after all, with the same general hijinks one expects from the property)...and then also twisted.

Second, that while a twist can be cool, it’s what you do with the twist that counts. This is where so many “twisty” books fall flat. If the zombies had been real, but that was all there was to it...well, yeah, I still would have seen that movie, but probably only once, and I certainly wouldn’t be talking about it almost 30 years later. It’s the second turn of the screw that takes the story from cool concept to satisfying, surprising, and complete story.

Also, "It's Terror Time Again" is still an absolute banger. I had it played at my wedding reception, because I am very, very cool.

++Yes, the slew of direct-to-video Scooby-Doo films that followed Zombie Island all feature real monsters. Once you’ve power-scaled like that, it’s hard to go back to what you were doing before.

+++Generally attributed to Confucius, though likely incorrectly

I grew up picnicking in our local cemetery. My maternal grandmother died when I was in first grade, and my mother would often take the family to have coffee with her. Inevitably, my brother and I argued about how best to arrange the roses (he liked the same number of roses on either side of the headstone; I vehemently asserted that asymmetry looked better), and then we’d sit quietly, Baba beneath us, and eat our sandwiches. My mother always poured a thermos of black coffee into the grass for Baba to drink. I say “poured”—I’m not sure why I’m using past tense. Mom still does this on Mothers’ Day and Baba’s birthday, and I still like to go with her.

Maybe this is why I’ve always thought of cemeteries not as scary places but peaceful places full of love. Along with libraries, they’re one of the few spots left that we can exist without having to spend money—and, along with libraries, they’re one of my favorite places to spend my time. When I travel, I go out of my way to visit new cemeteries; at home, I have my favorite graves. There are so many stories to be had in a cemetery, and so many people I like to say hello to even though we’ve never met.

So of course the moment I saw Rosie Grant’s To Die For: a Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes, I had to have it. The book catalogues Grant’s search throughout the U.S. for gravestones with recipes inscribed on them. She presents the recipes both as photographs of gravestones and as her own typed transcriptions, alongside interviews with surviving family members about the deceased and why whatever recipe appears on their grave is special. It’s a lovely, odd little cookbook.

I’ve been thinking, in turn, about what recipe I would choose to have on my grave, were I to have one. It would have to be simple enough to write out on a headstone, representative of me in some way, and something that I’d want to share with future generations. I do a lot of cooking, but I’m always playing with new recipes, so it’s hard to pick one that feels representative.

Pumpkin, though. Surely something pumpkin. I have three different pumpkin-exclusive cookbooks and an entire fat section of my binder of clipped/printed recipes dedicated to the cheerful squash. In the month of October, I make nothing but pumpkin—culminating in a Halloween feast for friends of a good dozen different pumpkin dishes. (If you thought pumpkin was exclusively useful to baked goods, think again! Curry-spiced pumpkin tofu calzones! Pumpkin lasagne! Pumpkin chili! Afghan pumpkin stew! Every year I find new things!)

—And, when thought about that way, the choice becomes easy. Because, while my Halloween menu changes year after year, there is one thing I absolutely always make. It’s fast, easy, and very popular with friends:

Pumpkin Hummus

3 cans chickpeas, drained
6 tsp maple syrup
1.5 cans pumpkin
3 heaping tsp garlic
2 cups (loose) fresh rosemary
6 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp salt, or to taste

Blend in a food processor. This is the amount I make for my Halloween party each year; feel free to scale down if not feeding a crowd.

What recipe would you want on your grave? Let me know in the comments! I’m pretty sure this is about to become my new favorite icebreaker question!

No craft table section this month. This newsletter’s already much too long++, and my craft time has been going to painting my study, which is very much a haphazard work-in-progress.

++But it was important that I talk about Scooby-Doo as much as I did, and I have no regrets

I’ve gotten absolutely lost down the rabbit hole of listening to the discography of Osaka pop-punk band Shonen Knife Their lyrics are fun, happy, silly, and surprising in ways that stick to the ribs of my brain and make everything in the world seem just a little bit easier. I defy you to watch this and not then spend the rest of the day with it stuck in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc5VL7rqAvk

...That is, unless you already have “It’s Terror Time” stuck in your head ;P

Always,
Marley