Mina’s having a hell of a family reunion. After the death and chaos of Halloween, Mina and the gang are looking forward to their road trip to Roswell, New Mexico, where they are hoping to be thrilled by the alien stories and have some R & R with Mina’s parents. However, their trip ends abruptly and before they know it, they are back in New Orleans. Instead of enjoying the fall celebrations and renovating the mansion, they find themselves investigating a serial killer who claims to be a real vampire in disturbing letters to the press.
UCLan Publishing
As the city is gripped by fear, a group of believers is planning to disrupt the fragile balance between the humans and the supernatural creatures hiding in the shadows. This threatens the peace that Mina and her friends have been working so hard at maintaining.
Caught between investigating the killer and trying to stop the group’s destructive plans, Mina’s third mystery might be her last…
I horrified Antonia, the publicist that organised this guest post for us by telling her that, in a school library, a book set in the 90s is a historical novel 😁 The Mina series are <historical> horror mystery for teens and YA and should be in all your libraries! The author, Amy McCaw, wrote a piece for us about how she establised the setting.
Why the fascination with 90s nostalgia?
Books, music, fashion and movies from the 90s seem to be more popular than ever. I’m still as obsessed with my 90s favourites as I ever was, and I have a few theories about why the fascination with the 90s persists.
When I started writing Mina and the Undead, I wasn’t sure what year I would set it in. During the very early stages of writing, I realised that the Interview with the Vampire movie came out in 1994, and 1995 was also the deadliest year in New Orleans history, with over 400 people being murdered that year alone. Those two things came together in my imagination to produce a murder mystery where vampires might be responsible for the high crime rates.
Once I’d settled on the 90s, I realised how fun it would be to lean into 90s pop culture in the plot, music, movie references and clothing. The book ended up having the feel of things I loved in the 90s, including Scream, Buffy and Charmed. I was a teenager later in the 90s, and I think enjoying those things so much in my formative years left a lasting impression on me. When I watch my 90s favourites, they’re still great on their own merits, but they also take me right back to that time.
There are a lot of reasons why the 90s might have continued to have such a lasting impact. The music has a distinctive feel, with that grunge and indie sound never really being replicated since. Slashers and paranormal books and TV shows had a real moment, and horror series like Point Horror and Fear Street were at the peak of their popularity. Like me, some people circle back to their old interests, but this can’t be true of younger readers who weren’t born in the 90s. In my experience, teenagers enjoy dipping their toes into a time period that feels relatively recent and yet so different from current pop culture, with an instantly recognisable flavour.
If you’re a fan of 90s pop culture, I highly recommend visiting the original influences I’ve already mentioned. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still my all-time favourite form of any pop culture, and Scream reinvented the slasher genre, making it self-referential and delighting in outlandish, gory kills.
There are also plenty of YA books set in the 90s or that have that 90s feel that I always crave. Reading anything by Kathryn Foxfield, Cynthia Murphy or Kat Ellis will fill that Point-Horror shaped gap in your life. I also recommend Kendare Blake’s Buffyverse books if you’re looking for something that reads exactly like the Buffy TV show. I recently read The Babysitter’s Coven by Kate Williams, and that’s packed with 90s references and has a feel somewhere between Buffy, Charmed and The Babysitters Club.
I love delving into different time periods in my reading and writing, and I’m delighted that readers seem to agree with me.
Amy McCaw is a YA author and YouTuber. She’s the author of the Mina and the Undead series, YA murder mysteries set in 1995 New Orleans. She also co-curated the A Taste of Darkness horror anthology with Maria Kuzniar. Her main interests are books, movies and the macabre, and her novels have elements of all of these. Unsurprisingly, she’s a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan and has gone to conventions to meet James Marsters more times than she cares to admit.
If you want to talk with Amy about books or 90s movies, you can find her on Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube.
Mina and the Cult, the last in the trilogy, is published in the UK by UCLan Publishing on 4th April 2024
