Welcome to the Hive Nadi Reed Perez!

To celebrate the release of coming-of-age fantasy THE AFTERLIFE OF MAL CALDERA, Nadi discusses the inspirations and research behind this “life-affirming” debut.

Before we hand you over, let’s find out more:

Mal’s life is over. Her afterlife is only just beginning…

By turns irreverently funny and deeply moving, this debut contemporary fantasy is perfect for fans of They Both Die at the End and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Mal Caldera-former rockstar, retired wild-child and excommunicated black sheep of her Catholic family-is dead. Not that she cares. She only feels bad that her younger sister, Cris, has been left to pick up the pieces Mal left behind. While her fellow ghosts party their afterlives away at an abandoned mansion they call the Haunt, Mal is determined to make contact with Cris from beyond the grave.

She enlists the help of a reluctant local medium, Ren, and together, they concoct a plan to pass on a message to Cris. But the more time they spend together, the more they begin to wonder what might have been if they’d met before Mal died.

Mal knows it’s wrong to hold on so tightly to her old life. Bad things happen to ghosts who interfere with the living, and Mal can’t help wondering if she’s hurting the people she loves by hanging around, haunting their lives. But Mal has always been selfish, and letting go might just be the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

Funny, emotional and life-affirming, The Afterlife of Mal Caldera will have readers laughing one minute and sobbing the next.

The Afterlife of Mal Caldera is out today from Titan Books! You can order your copy HERE

IRL Hauntings

by Nadi Reed Perez

Most people don’t believe in vampires or werewolves anymore. If you want to mine “primary sources” on those traditional monsters for inspiration (with a few exceptions) you’d have to dig into historical records. But plenty of people still believe in ghosts. Their personal accounts plastered the sketchy early 2000’s internet, from which I scoured hundreds of stories for inspiration.

The initial premise for The Afterlife of Mal Caldera came to me when I was about eleven or twelve in the oughts. I wondered why I’d never seen a ghost as the main character of her own story. So I set about researching the afterlife, seeking inspiration for characters to populate her adventure. I distinctly recall checking out books aimed at children about ghost folklore, where I read that in some haunted locations, visitors report hearing phantom music. Where could it be coming from, I figured, aside from a band of dead musicians? If not all ghosts were occupied stacking the chairs of the living for attention, perhaps the rest were reveling to the music. This led me to devising the Haunt, an abandoned mansion that hosts an eternal afterparty, tempting recently deceased ghosts like Mal to forget about their lost lives.

It didn’t take long before I’d exhausted my middle school library’s paranormal section and turned to the world wide web for answers. Google was young back then, though more often than not, kids like me brought their questions to a trusty butler called Ask Jeeves. But I didn’t know about reputable sources then—to be honest, I can’t remember whether or not I’d yet discovered Wikipedia. Web 1.0 was an untamed jungle of free website hosting through the likes of GeoCities and Angelfire, made up of charmingly kitsch coding and questionable color palettes. Most of the ghost stories I read were in hard-to-read blood red or neon green text over a pitch black or textured tile background, bordered by dancing gifs of sheet ghosts and rotating 3D skeletons (like these).

Another staple of ghost lore that influenced me was the recurring story of the “vanishing hitchhiker”. One of the popular variations of the folktale turned urban legend: one evening, a young gentleman meets a lovely girl at a dance, and after a romantic night of breathless dancing, he gallantly offers her a ride home. But after dropping her off, he finds the next day that she left her shawl. When he arrives once more at her house to return it, her parents answer the door in astonishment—why, their daughter has been dead for seven years!

In more modern versions, the young man is a taxi driver, and the spirit disappears on arrival to the destination. But what if the ghost girl stuck around? I thought it had a lot of potential as a meet-cute. That was how I first conceived Mal meeting my medium who doesn’t know he’s a medium, Ren.

Possibly the most influential website I came across was a massive database of NDEs, or near death experiences. It was carefully indexed by a number of factors, including the religious background of the reporting individual, as well as the “destination” of their wandering soul—whether they reported staying near their body, going to different religious or non-denominational variations of heaven or hell, or elsewhere. That “elsewhere” was particularly inspiring—stories of people who reported wandering far from their body, but still on Earth, were a gold mine. They were essentially astral projecting, on what I reasoned must have been the same metaphysical plane as ghosts. One entry reported the temporarily deceased seeing other spirits who briefly “possessed” the bodies of the living while they were imbibing various poisons, which was where I got the idea for my ghosts being able to enjoy libations secondhand.

Reading so many different versions of the afterlife helped me shake off the last scurf of an unhappily evangelical upbringing. After all, there wouldn’t be a story if my dead heroine went straight to heaven (or hell—that’s been done already). And I didn’t find “going into the light” to be a particularly original ending, either. Maybe I’ve found that searching for answers is more compelling than choosing just one to accept as truth.

As much as I wish my teenaged self had saved the sources for these stories, there probably wouldn’t have been much point. Geocities went inactive in 2009, officially shut down in 2019. Angelfire still hosts websites, but for a fee, the majority of fan pages and digital conspiracy boards it once enshrined purged for profit. I had to edit an homage to these websites in which one of the characters attempts to research their astral condition, only to find dubious digital sources filled with eyesore fonts and flashing gifs, clarifying that these results were archived—the lingering ghosts of dead websites.

(What happens to a spirit dwelling on the internet when their web page is deleted? Do they die again, for good?)

That wasn’t the only edit to update my novel for the times. Though I had to ditch the “vanishing hitchhiker” meet-cute in favor of plot over coincidence, Ren remained a taxi driver in early drafts. It made sense that if he could see poltergeists, he’d prefer to stay on the move to avoid them rather than getting cornered by a shrieking banshee while at work (and not the kind we now call Karens). Sadly, Ren had to trade in what would’ve been an iconic yellow taxi. Now he’s a rideshare driver, though I wouldn’t declare brand loyalty by naming which app—especially when most drivers I’ve chatted with aren’t paid enough to work exclusively for one or the other, anyway.

The world is less colorful now without yellow taxis and free web hosting. Now most “personal” websites are hosted through paid subscriptions and built out of the same sleek, minimalist, soulless blocks and sliders. Social media takes the status of friends and creatives and celebrities we actually want to follow and plays algorithmic keep away, running and hiding between ad after ad. Did you want to avoid seeing the grotesque, bigoted braggadocio of this politician or that billionaire CEO? Sorry, but the unseen hand of the digital market is going to shove his face on your front page.

You could say that Web 2.0 is haunted. Old bookmarks become error pages. Attempts to source images lead to dead ends. And, of course, there’s the “dead internet” theory which posits that in the coming years, most activity on the internet will be artificial, not made by living beings on the other side of screen, but AI. The place where I once conducted the primary research for my book is now a digital graveyard. Fortunately, though, some archivists have ensured there’s still shrines preserved for visiting.

I have hope for reviving the independence and creativity of Web 1.0. The hosting site Neocities—true to the homage of its name—offers a free version. It’s a blank slate on which some creatives, old web enthusiasts, and digital dilettantes have coded splashy, campy, unrestrained art portfolios, web diaries, experimental games, and more. I painstakingly learned and applied just enough code to make my own author page an ode to the oughts. Maybe it’s a bit of an eyesore, but at least it’s got spirit. 

The Afterlife of Mal Caldera is out today from Titan Books! You can order your copy HERE