Here's another First, Last, Everything. And this time it's author Travis Riddle.

TRAVIS M. RIDDLE lives with his pooch in Austin, TX, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University. His work has been published in award-winning literary journal the Sorin Oak Review. He is the author of Balam, Spring and The Narrows.

Like countless other millennials, the first book I can remember really falling in love with was The Sorcerer’s Stone. (Yes, the stone belongs to a Sorcerer for me, not a Philosopher. Sorry!) The first two Harry Potter books were already out by the time I was introduced to the series, with the first gifted to me by my aunt who knew me as a constant reader. I distinctly remember being given the book and immediately digging into it in the back of her car, downright entranced by the narrative and the illustrations that accompanied the heading of each chapter.

It didn’t take me long to tear through that book and beg my mom to pick up The Chamber of Secrets from Barnes & Noble “on her way home from work,” which I now realize, looking back on it with the mind of someone who’s driven all over that town, was not at all on her way home from work and was in fact 20 minutes out of the way and then 20 minutes back. I guess in my dumb kid brain, everything was on the way home from her work. Luckily, she obliged anyway. Thanks, Mom.

What initially drew me into the series wasn’t really the concept of being whisked away to a magic school—I harbored no jealousy toward the characters, I don’t have any interest in magic unless it’s to conjure up some fresh McDonald’s french fries at will—nor was it the characters themselves, though as the years went on I did grow to appreciate them.

What I loved about the series was its nasty monsters, because I am a nasty boy.

My favorite parts of the books were when Harry and the gang had to learn about monsters in their classes or wrangle with them out in the real world. I was fascinated by the cabal of centaurs living out in the Forbidden Forest, and my favorite chapter hands-down was when the trio confronts the troll in the bathroom. That chapter had my favorite illustration, and it was my favorite scene in the film when it came out (and rest assured, I was there opening night).

As the years went on and the series grew in popularity, I appreciated Rowling’s willingness to let the narrative and characters grow and develop organically, opting to not let everything stay relatively light and cheery like the early books but instead show the darkness of that world and the real terror and stakes of the villain’s goals. I grew up alongside the characters, almost perfectly matching their ages as each book came out, and while I didn’t perfectly identify with any one character, I could see bits of myself in each of them. They felt real, they felt human, which was something I had not yet really encountered in a book, especially fantasy.

This was also the biggest cultural phenomenon surrounding a book ever, and I doubt we’ll ever see something like this again. You can bet that I was at that 20-minutes-away Barnes & Noble with my aunt and cousin at every midnight release, surrounded by hundreds of other fans eagerly anticipating the new book, always eager to see just how meaty the new volume was. We were continually staggered by how long each book was, given it was our first foray into the fantasy genre. My cousin and I would then race back to our respective homes and spend the entire next day(s) reading, trying to either finish within 24 hours or at the very least beat the other one. Even my mom bought into the phenomenon for a while, despite the fact I’d never seen her read a book before—and I still haven’t, because she was asking me to read her the books before we went to bed.

Plus, as many have pointed out to me before, I have the same initials and even surname as Voldemort. So how could I not choose this series?

The last book I finished was The Shining by Stephen King (as if you didn’t know who wrote that one). It’s one of King’s first novels, but I’ve come to it pretty late; I didn’t start reading King until a couple years ago, and I already tore through 19 of his other books before getting to this one. Reading The Dark Tower and all the other books connected to it was some of the most fun I’ve had reading in a long time. Highly recommended.

Given that I’d read so many other King stories before this one, though, meant that some things in it that were probably pretty fresh to his fans at the time (it was only his third novel) felt a little stale to me. There are certain wells King seems to go back to a lot, and I guess The Shining is where some of them originated—it sometimes feels like in King’s universe, everyone’s parents were abusive in some way, bad behaviors are passed from parent to child, and the villains are extremely racist.

But I still enjoyed the book! Because it has all the other elements of King’s writing that I first fell in love with when I read It, my first book from him. He often writes lengthy tomes, anywhere from 500 to 1,000 pages, and it’s because he really takes his time developing the characters (and usually the setting, as well). In this book, it was over 100 pages in before the family even stepped foot in the Overlook Hotel; everything before that was dedicated to fleshing out their histories, their personalities, and their relationships to each other. King’s style is something I’ve tried to emulate in my own work (though who knows if I’ve been remotely successful), dedicating plenty of time to slow down and examine the characters, flesh them out so that the reader gets to know them intimately.

Even if King explores a lot of the same themes in some of his books, at the very least you know you’ll always be getting great character work from him and you definitely won’t be walking away without knowing his characters inside and out. His writing style is also very “readable” in a way that I can’t even describe, but I simply breeze through everything I read by him—The Shining is nearly 700 pages long, and I finished it in four days.

And finally, a book that holds a special place in my heart would be House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s not that I have an especially deep attachment to any of the characters in the book, and I didn’t read it at a special, perfect time in my life or anything. But the format of the novel was so fascinating and so unlike anything I’d ever read before, it really broadened my horizons for what constitutes a “novel” and the different forms in which someone can tell a story. 

The book is a bit complicated to explain; it’s about a documentary called The Navidson Record shot by Will Navidson, about him and his family moving into a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. A concept that’s weird and creepy enough for a horror novel on its own, but that’s not where the book stops.

Instead, the book you’re reading is written by a recently-deceased man named Zampanò, who found The Navidson Record and dedicated the later portion of his life to uncovering its secrets and writing an academic study on it and the house. So the novel is part academic study, part found footage film.

But then it goes one layer deeper, with a man named Johnny Truant having come into Zampanò’s research, and then providing his own notes on the matter and beginning to do his own research, commenting in the margins or footnotes of what Zampanò has already written.

So we have The Navidson Record, which plays out like a found footage horror film; then we have Zampanò’s exhaustive research; then we have Johnny Truant’s notes and letters detailing his growing obsession with the documentary and his descent into paranoia and madness.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

But it’s also a fascinating experiment in storytelling, crafting all these different elements that are ostensibly “real” artifacts (even on the inner title page, the book is credited as being written by Zampanò with an introduction and notes by Johnny Truant, instead of Danielewski, who just “compiled” the research), weaving together three distinct narratives that intertwine and echo each other in strange, surprising ways. Approaching the novel buying into that conceit, that it’s all real and that you’re reading actual notes written by these people, makes it a truly unique and fun journey.

I spent hours reading it alone in a dark house over one cold Texas winter, and to this day it is the only horror book that has genuinely creeped me out. I really really did not want to walk to the end of the dark hallway to the bathroom to brush my teeth. In the end, good hygiene won and I did not die. 

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