New book portrays Delaware as fantasyland

You've stared up at the wall all afternoon, closely monitoring the agonizingly slow progress of the clock's hands, waiting for your last class of the day to end. Finally, your professor dismisses class and it's time to head back to your dorm or apartment. If only your trip home was as easy as walking down Main Street or catching the bus. Instead, you must trek through dense, jagged mountain terrain and fight off hordes of six-armed, tusked barbarians before you can even begin to breathe easy. Welcome to Delaware.

More specifically, this is M.T. Anderson's Delaware. Anderson, an award-winning author for children and young adults, has set his most recent release in a mysterious, exotic realm of fantasy known as Delaware.

"It's a land of marvels, isn't it?" jokes Anderson.

His latest release, "Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware," is the third installment of his humorous "Pals in Peril" adventure series. In his book, Anderson portrays Delaware as a land of wonder and mystery, full of danger, dinosaurs, and gangsters — a land that time forgot.        

Anderson grew up an avid reader, devouring books to the point where his parents would make fun of him. Some of Anderson's favorites included Dr. Seuss, Ray Bradbury and Tove Jansson, all authors who have played a role in sculpting his style of writing. In fact, Anderson describes the Delaware he portrays in "Jasper Dash" as "Seuss-ian," and his novels are a homage to those adventure books he read as a kid.        Anderson says he decided to set his latest adventure tale in Delaware because of its relative obscurity.    
 

"Many states have a stereotype of what they're supposed to be like," he says. "You have your stereotypical Texan in the 10-gallon hat and spurs, your stereotyped New Yorker, but I think America does not yet know what the stereotypical Delawarean is."        The running joke in Anderson's book is that Delaware is a mist-shrouded, fabulous land of adventure cut off from the civilized world.   
 

"People don't have a preconception of Delaware, so I could make it into something that is completely fantastical and bizarre," Anderson explains. "Not a lot is known about it by people from other states, so I could have fun turning it into something that is like ‘Conan the Barbarian' or ‘Tarzan of the Apes.' "

 

While recently promoting his book in California, Anderson says he encountered children who couldn't even locate Delaware on a map.

 

"Several kids thought Delaware was a Midwestern state," he says. "In one case, I really had to argue with the kids that it really was near Pennsylvania and Maryland."

 

Anderson models many aspects of his witty adventure books such as "Jasper Dash" after other popular book series or books he read growing up, and although the three "Pals in Peril" books have each taken Anderson only about two weeks to a month to write, a lot of thought goes into each story. While Anderson has written more serious, historically-based novels such as the two-part series "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing" (which took Anderson six years to pen), he also takes great pride in Jasper, Katie, and Lily, the trio of friends who serve as the main characters in the "Pals in Peril" series.    
    "I really love these three characters," Anderson says. "Both Jasper and Katie are based on book heroes. Jasper Dash is based on old boy's adventure novels, things like Tom Swift. Katie is based on books like the ‘Goosebumps' series from the late nineties, someone who is always fighting supernatural terrors, that kind of thing."
 

The third central character, Lily, is more of a down-to-earth personality.   
 

"Lily is supposed to be kind of like many readers," he says. "She sees the world of fantastic events but is not usually a part of them, but now she's drawn in because she's friends with these people."   
 

As for the book's Delaware ties, Anderson says that he "almost forcibly did no research whatsoever with the book" when it came to Delaware's true history and culture.   
"I used MapQuest as my main source," he says. "If we ignore every fact I know about the state, what does MapQuest suggest that the place might be like? Slaughter Beach, Hazard Landing, that kind of place. Those clearly sound like places where Vikings would be."

 

"Sandtown, over on the western side of the state, clearly that has to be in the middle of a desert," Anderson says. "That was one of the ways I sort of made up this imagined topography of Delaware."

 

Anderson believes that more work needs to be done to bring attention to Delaware on a national level, but that wasn't the purpose of his book.

 

"I'm not sure that I'm the one to do that work, because, you know, I seem to have gotten some of my facts wrong," Anderson says. "For example, the University of Delaware, that's in Newark. Keep in mind that Newark in the book is in a range of mountains in which lived six-armed, tusked barbarians."

 

Anderson's book tour took him to Newark on Monday when he appeared at the Trabant University Center. Anderson read a few passages from his book and then fielded questions from the audience before a book signing. He also revealed that the sequel to "Jasper Dash and the Flame Pits of Delaware," the fourth book in his "Pals in Peril" series, will be a spy novel set in Wilmington. Anderson re-iterated that after seeing Delaware in person, he realizes he may have misrepresented the first state.

 

"After all this time that I've spent writing about Delaware, I have discovered that I did make a couple of errors in the book, for which I apologize," Anderson joked to the crowd. "My apologies to your blue chicken."