An old Scottish Ballad

by Clare B. Dunkle...

I think I was about ten years old when I found out where my last name came from. Back then, I wasn’t Clare B. Dunkle, the author, I was Clare Buckalew, the fifth-grader with a pretty weird last name. It turns out that it’s even weirder if you spell it the way they do in Scotland: Buccleuch. But there’s a duke with my name in Scotland, and an original coat of arms,

and a family motto, and even a rousing old ballad from the 1500’s about an ancestor of mine called the Bold Buccleuch, who raided an English castle in the middle of the night and almost started a war.

Ever since I found out all that, I’ve had adeep and abiding love of Scotland.

Six years ago, I decided to write a werewolf story called BY THESE TEN BONES. I wanted it to be wonderfully dangerous and gloomy, but shot through with flashes of great courage and true love. In other words, I wanted it to be like an old Scottish ballad. So I set my story in the Highlands of Scotland in the Middle Ages. I put in a dark little house full of peat smoke, like this:

And in that smoky houseI put a girl namedMaddie,who loves her home and family and who has never left her tiny town. Maddie meets a pale, green-eyed woodcarver named Paul and soon begins to fall in love with him. But she meets something evil, too. When that evil werewolf presence almost killsthe woodcarver, she gets drawn into a terrifying secret.

Maddiefinds out that she can save Paul’s life, but only if she’s willing to pay a price. That price is higher than shecould have possibly imagined. And before long, she realizes that if Paul dies, her entire town will fall under the werewolf’s shadow.As people begin to die one by one, Maddiehas to decide what to do.

Working on this story gave me the perfect opportunity to visit Scotland. I walked through ancient castles

and explored gloomy, loch-filled valleys

that seemed so dreary and ominous even at noon that a werewolf would be right at home in them. And I put all that menace and beauty into the book.

BY THESE TEN BONES has just come out today in a gorgeous paperback edition. I couldn’t be more thrilled. I hope it brings new readers to this werewolf tale that has the sad, sweet air of an old Scottish ballad.