The Uninvited
Page 25
His eyes left the windows and returned to me. “Why do you want to be with me so badly, Ivy? Why did you always come back?”
“I don’t think that’s the sort of answer that can be properly explained with mere words.” I took his hand and stepped backward, coaxing him toward the door of the lodge, which buzzed and rattled from the music and dancing within. “The head makes war, but the heart makes peace. And, thankfully, the heart ends up ruling more than not.”
I moved to open the door, but he called out, “Wait.”
He scooted closer to me with soft footsteps that brushed against the sidewalk, and he cupped his left hand around the back of my head. Before I could even wonder at his actions, he bent forward, and he kissed me on the lips.
I could describe that first real kiss in terms of piano crescendos or a blaze of fireworks or the brisk rushing of my blood through my veins, but I’m going to leave that particular moment as a gift for just him and me. It belonged to us, and nothing could take it away—even though those cruel years of war and disease seemed to have stolen everything else that once was ours. We lifted our heads and caught our breaths, and I opened the door and led him inside, where we joined the other members of the lost. We joined them in the sweet strains of music that lifted into the air and carried across all of Buchanan and out to the world beyond.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my amazing Fairy Godmother of an editor, Lucia Macro, for getting this whole thing started. If she hadn’t called up my agent and asked if I, a young-adult novelist, would be interested in writing a novel for adults set in 1918 (a dream call for any author!), this book would not be here today. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Lucia. Thank you also to Nicole Fischer and the rest of the HarperCollins team who helped bring this novel to life.
Thank you to my indefatigable agent, Barbara Poelle, who stuck by me for four long years before I even started selling books to publishers. Barbara always champions my work with such passion and care, and I’m so thankful to have her guiding my path in this surreal and wonderful world of publishing.
Thanks to my husband, Adam, and our two kids, for putting up with all the times I’ve run upstairs to our home office or out to coffeehouses so I could disappear into my fictional worlds with my laptop. Their love and support mean the world to me. Thank you also to Adam for naming Buchanan, Illinois.
Thanks to my sister, Carrie Raleigh, for always being one of my first readers, ever since my childhood attempts at writing novels. Her help with this particular manuscript greatly boosted my confidence in the book’s ability to work the way I wanted it to work, and I’m utterly grateful.
Thank you to my parents, Richard and Jennifer Proeschel, for sharing their love of history with me via classic movies, TV series, books, music, and trips to historical sites throughout my childhood. I suppose I should also thank my mom for being born in Illinois and for taking me to visit relatives and small towns in the “Land of Lincoln” years ago. Those visits most certainly helped me create my fictional town in this book and educated me in the way sweet corn “tastes like candy.”
I’m extremely appreciative of historical societies, universities, and government agencies that have meticulously scanned documents from the past, including newspaper clippings about the Spanish influenza, letters and diaries from World War I, 1918 Alien Registration cards, photographs, and sheet music covers. Of particular help were the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the University of Michigan’s online Influenza Encyclopedia (influenzaarchive.org), and the Library of Congress. Thank you also to archive.org and collectors of vintage music who have made recordings of songs from the 1910s available for all to hear in this modern age.
Thank you to my team of supportive writer friends: Kim Murphy, Francesca Miller, Ara Burklund, Teri Brown, Miriam Forster, Kelly Garrett, Heidi Schulz, Amber J. Keyser, Lauren DeStefano, and members of SCBWI Oregon, The Lucky 13s, and Corsets, Cutlasses, & Candlesticks. My fellow writers never cease to cheer me on in all of my writing endeavors, and I’m grateful for their presence in my life, both in person and online.
Last but not least, I must give a special nod to Iggy, my dog of sixteen and a half years. He passed away on the same day that I turned in the first draft of this book, but he was by my side while I worked until the end. Here’s to Iggy and his patience, and to our puppy, Wilbur, my newest writing companion.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the author
* * *
Meet Cat Winters
About the book
* * *
The Story Behind The Uninvited
Reading Group Guide
Read on
* * *
The Uninvited Playlist
About the author
Meet Cat Winters
CAT WINTERS was born and raised in Southern California, near Disneyland, which may explain her love of haunted mansions, bygone eras, and fantasylands. She received degrees in drama and English from the University of California, Irvine, and formerly worked in publishing.
Her debut novel, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, was released to widespread critical acclaim, including starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and School Library Journal. The novel has been named a 2014 Morris Award Finalist, a 2013 Bram Stoker Award Nominee, a School Library Journal Best Book of 2013, a Booklist 2013 Top Ten Best Horror Fiction for Youth, and one of Booklist’s 2013 Top Ten First Novels for Youth. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two kids.
Visit her online at catwinters.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
About the book
The Story Behind The Uninvited
SOME BOOKS START with a single spark of inspiration. Others evolve after a series of ideas plant themselves inside an author’s head and germinate over time. The Uninvited is one of the latter types of novels. The basic plotline grew out of various key moments in my recent past: a phone call from an editor, the deletion of a subplot about German-Americans from another one of my novels, a lighthearted tweet about sending deceased characters from my favorite historical TV series to an afterlife version of a speakeasy.
Several nonfiction books played a tremendous role in turning these little seedlings of ideas into a full-fledged novel. The Uninvited opens with a murder. Although the victim, Mr. Schendel, is fictional, his death and the anti-German activity portrayed throughout the novel stem directly from information I gleaned from two books: The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–1918, by Meirion and Susie Harries (Vintage Books, 1998), and Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I, by Frederick C. Luebke (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). The texts introduced me to the real-life murder of Robert Prager, a German-born coalminer lynched by a mob of 300 men and boys outside of Collinsville, Illinois, on April 5, 1918. The books also opened my eyes to other startling events from World War I–era America: the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts to weed out disloyalty, the creation of the American Protective League, the disposal of German names and culture, the use of government detainment camps for German-Americans, and the various acts of violence committed against German-Americans. The more I researched, the more the element of “superpatriotism” in 1917 and 1918 America reared its head and begged to be put into a novel.
On the other side of the coin lay the German war experience. While working on a short story, I researched the history of the occupation of France during World War I, and I came across a series of excerpts from German war diaries in the form of the book Convicted out of Her Own Mouth: The Record of German Crimes, by H. W. Wilson (George H. Doran Company, 1917). I dug a little further and found the anonymous A German Deserter’s War Experience, translated by J. Koettgen (B. W. Huebsch, 1917). The experiences of German soldiers in Belgium and France, as well as one German soldier’s harrowing escape to America in the coal bunker of a ship, led to the creation of Daniel Schendel. When I first started working on the character, I knew
he possessed secrets, but it took the discovery of these gripping and often difficult-to-read firsthand accounts to learn what those secrets were. Daniel is not meant to be an exact portrayal of specific real-life German soldiers and deserters, but a fictional character inspired by history.
Another factor I needed to consider when portraying the world of 1918 America was the “Spanish influenza” pandemic. The Uninvited is not the first novel I’ve written about this lethal and terrifying strain of the flu, which killed millions of people around the globe in the span of less than a year. Seeking to portray a different side of the flu’s devastating effects, I turned to Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918, by Patricia J. Fanning (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Fanning’s book details life in 1918 Norwood, Massachusetts, a small, ethnically diverse community that allowed prejudice to rule its health care system during the massive spread of the Spanish flu. The struggles of immigrants to receive access to doctors and hospitals during the pandemic tied in with my findings about superpatriotism. Even in the case of the flu, the push for everyone to be “100 percent American” during the war years deeply affected ordinary lives and too often resulted in deaths.
I chose to set The Uninvited in the fictional city of Buchanan, Illinois. I did not want to cast blame on one specific community. The fear of infiltration by the enemy, hate crimes, and the Spanish influenza affected every single region of the United States, not just Collinsville, Illinois, and Norwood, Massachusetts. Mistakes were made and heroes emerged in both big cities and small rural communities. The Uninvited is a fable about a tragic moment in history, and Buchanan is simply the fictional “all-American” town in which that fable is set.
I’m deeply indebted to the individuals who left behind their personal accounts of the struggles that they experienced during the World War I and the Spanish influenza years. Their courage and honesty moved me deeply, and I sincerely hope I’ve played a small part in ensuring that this heartbreaking yet fascinating moment in time will not be forgotten.
Reading Group Guide
1.Fictional newspaper clippings appear throughout The Uninvited. To what extent do these journalistic accounts of life during October 1918 enhance Ivy’s descriptions of the time period? How would the novel differ without the inclusion of the newspaper excerpts?
2.Talk of ghosts, specters, and spirits pervade the novel, but what most haunts Ivy? What (or who) is the most frightening aspect of the book?
3.When Mrs. Rowan asks her husband if he and their son killed a man, Mr. Rowan responds, “That wasn’t a man. He was a German.” What factors most contributed to their decision to kill? How do modern hate crimes compare to those of 1918 America?
4.Ivy, once a recluse, aims to spread her wings and soar. May, a Chicago girl who has already tasted quite a bit of life, has withdrawn into her home. How important is it that these two women cross paths? How would Ivy’s experiences have been different if she hadn’t chosen to live with May?
5.Why are Ivy and Daniel drawn to each other, despite her initial prejudices against Germans and his knowledge of her family’s guilt? How do they influence each other?
6.Jazz music is present throughout all of Ivy and Daniel’s encounters. During their first moment of intimacy, Ivy says, “We were music. We were jazz. We were alive.” What does music mean to each of them? How does music affect their relationship?
7.What impact do Nela and Addie have on Ivy? What lessons do they teach Ivy?
8.Flashbacks to Ivy’s childhood and high school years appear throughout The Uninvited. What is it about Ivy’s past that seems to affect her the most? Does she seem eager to escape her past, or to understand it?
9.Initially, Ivy doesn’t react well when Daniel describes his experiences in Belgium. Are her reactions justified? How did you react to his confessions?
10.Ivy first becomes aware that all is not as it seems when Daniel says, “I can’t ever leave this goddamned building.” At what point did you begin to suspect the central secret in the book? How would rereading the novel change your experience with the book?
11.In one of the final chapters, Addie tells Ivy, “We’re just going to be numbers in the newspaper. ‘Statistics,’ as my daddy called it.” How would the portrayal of flu deaths in The Uninvited have differed if the dead were simply mentioned as statistics? What was your initial response to the way the author chose to portray the deaths?
12.How would we, in our modern era, react to a pandemic the size of the 1918 influenza compared to the way in which people in 1918 reacted?
13.When encountering Frank Rowan, the only words Daniel chooses to say to him are “I understand.” What does he mean by this statement?
14.Is the final scene a happy or a tragic one? Why?
15.To whom does the title The Uninvited most seem to refer?
Read on
The Uninvited Playlist
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD may have called the 1920s the “Jazz Age,” but jazz was already smoking hot by the time the United States entered the Great War in 1917. A distinctly American invention, jazz grew out of the melting pot of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. African drum rhythms, military marches, ragtime, blues, spirituals, and other creative influences merged together in a style of music that inspired people of all races and backgrounds to stand up and dance.
The following is a playlist of the songs—mainly 1910s jazz and ragtime numbers—mentioned in The Uninvited. Most of the music, including the original recordings, can still be heard today, thanks to websites such as archive.org. Visit www.CatWinters.com to find links to samples of the music.
1.“For Me and My Gal,” Van and Schenck, 1917
2.“The ‘Jelly Roll’ Blues,” Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton, 1915
3.“Livery Stable Blues,” Original Dixieland Jass Band, 1917
4.“Tiger Rag,” Original Dixieland Jass Band, 1917
5.“Joe Turner Blues,” Wilbur Sweatman, 1917
6.“Bull Frog Blues,” Six Brown Brothers, 1916
7.“I’m Sorry I Made You Cry,” Henry Burr, 1918
8.“Maple Leaf Rag,” Scott Joplin, 1899
9.Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Ludwig van Beethoven, 1798
10.“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Irving Berlin, 1911
11.“Slippery Hank,” Earl Fuller’s Famous Jazz Band, 1917
12.“Nightingale Rag,” Joseph Lamb, 1915
13.“Gun-Cotton Rag,” Merle von Hagen, 1916
14.“Over There,” George M. Cohan, 1917
15.Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, Ludwig van Beethoven, 1824 (lyrics in the final movement adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem “Ode to Joy”)
16.“Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” Hughie Cannon, 1902
17.“Last Night Was the End of the World,” Henry Burr, 1913
18.“At the Jass Band Ball,” Original Dixieland Jass Band, 1917
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Bain Collection
U.S. Army Jazz Band from the First World War
Also by Cat Winters
YOUNG ADULT
The Cure for Dreaming
In the Shadow of Blackbirds
Credits
Cover design by Adam Johnson
Cover photographs: woman © by Richard Jenkins; woods © by Lee Avison/Arcangel Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE UNINVITED. Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Karp. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this
text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-234733-6
EPub Edition AUGUST 2015 ISBN 9780062347343
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