Author releases Monster children’s book

Author releases Monster children’s book

18 August 2021

THE story of a boy from Dublin who hunts and kills monsters is the debut children’s novel from Kilclief author Ian Mark.

Monster Hunting for Beginners sparked off a six-way bidding auction with HarperCollins emerging as the chosen publisher, signing Ian up to a three-book deal.

Aimed at young readers aged between 8-12, the humorous fantasy story features a boy called Jack who wakes up one day to find an ogre in his garden trying to eat his aunt.

After slaying the monster, the 10 year-old is taken on as an apprentice to a grumpy, 200-year-old monster hunter called Stoop and they head off to Cornwall, where more ogres are causing havoc.

It’s a complete change of direction for the writer, who co-writes Irish crime thrillers with his wife, Éilis O’Hanlon, a Sunday Independent columnist and journalist. 

Under the pen name Ingrid Black, the couple have written five books, four of them crime novels featuring Saxon and Grace Fitzgerald, a former FBI agent and detective chief superintendent with the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s Murder Squad.

Their first novel, The Dead (2003), was honoured with the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel and was sold widely throughout the world.

However, despite the success of the crime novels, it seems that a children’s writer has been inside Ian for a long time.

Ian explained: “Children’s books were always my favourite thing to read and they were always the thing that I most wanted to write. It was always my big love.

“However, my partner and I had an idea for a crime thriller. When the first book was accepted, we got caught up with writing three other books,

But even in that period, I still continued to write for children but I never published anything. 

“It’s meant to be a funny book, but that’s for other people to say, and I think the humour could be appreciated by children as young as five and a few years older than 12. I would hope parents will enjoy reading to their children.”

Ian said that he had been working on the book on and off for ten years and wondered if it would ever see the light of day.

“It started off as a short story, but it just grew and grew from there and I added new characters, monsters and incidents,” he recalled.

“I’d written a number of other children’s books before Monster Hunting and I came close a few times to getting them accepted by an agent, but never quite got there. 

“When I sent out the first few chapters of Monster Hunting at the start of last year, I sent it to lots of agents. Only two asked to see the whole thing. One of those never got back to me.

“I sent it to an agent called Sam Copeland and he liked it and pitched it to a few publishers,

“I’m very grateful for my good fortune, because I could so easily still be back at Square One, wondering if anyone would ever take a chance on Monster Hunting.”

Ian and Éilis and their three grown-up children have been living locally for the last few years after moving from Belfast. 

While Ingrid Black may well publish another crime thriller, Ian believes he will stick to children’s novels as he will be publishing two more books in the Monster Hunting series by 2023.

“I’m hoping that Monster Hunting will be well received but I have lots of other idea and characters for more children’s books,” added Ian.

Monster Hunting for Beginners in hardback will be released next month but is available on pre-order now on Amazon.

Waterstones have copies of special signed editions which will be available soon in shops and also online.