Scott Reintgen, author of myriad fantasy survival novels including the Dragonships series and the Waxways trilogy, delivers another YA genre thriller with Devious Prey. When armed soldiers board the dirigible the Grand Gesture, young smuggler Pearl tries not to panic about the contraband dragon that she and her aunt snuck aboard. Then the Grand Gesture shipwrecks on an uncharted desert island. After the dragon escapes her enchanted crate and begins hunting stranded passengers, the survivors—including Pearl, the soldiers, and their charge, a powerful teen wizard accused of murder—must rely on one another to make it out alive. Reintgen spoke with PW about his dragon era, putting a new spin on familiar fare, and his commitment to lifelong learning.
In your acknowledgements, you mention that Devious Prey was originally an adult novel called The Possible Meridian. How did it evolve into its final form?
The original version was wildly complicated. It had seven point-of-view characters and overcomplicated worldbuilding, but I was pretty confident about it so, against my agent’s [Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary] advice, I said, “Let’s push this out into the universe.”
Unsurprisingly, we got a lot of very kind rejections from editors who told us that while they loved certain components, they had a harder time with some of the worldbuilding. Over and over again, however, we heard this familiar refrain about how the thing that really did work for them was the dragoness hunting this group of people. That core component always stuck with me.
I feel like my YA novel A Door in the Dark unlocked this one for me a little bit. That book is a fantasy thriller that follows the survival of a group of people. It made me realize that Devious Prey should read that way, too. And so I recentered the story. Instead of saying it’s this big epic fantasy and these people are dealing with all these wild things that I was trying to come up with, I came back to the survivor aspect. And sure, there are fantasy elements, and there are characters with varying degrees of magical power, but the core part of the story is that something is hunting them, and they want to survive.
Your publisher is pitching Devious Prey as Yellow Jackets with dragons. Do you draw inspiration from other media?
My mental go-to while I was writing this was actually Lost. That was the first series my wife and I binge watched together when we were dating. What happens when a group of people land in a place that’s forcing them to become something new? In Yellow Jackets, the question is, “Did you really know the people you were around that whole time?” Because the characters were all on a soccer team, they had this baseline for each other, and then suddenly, they’re out in the woods and it’s like, who are they really? Were they really who they said they were back home? Did they transform into something else?
With Lost, you’re crash-landing somewhere with 70 strangers. How do you get along? Who leads, who takes a back seat, who can help in what scenarios and what skills do they bring? That’s always been really fascinating to me.
Your middle grade novel The Last Dragon on Mars is also about dragons. How do you keep things fresh when writing books about similar topics?
The beauty of having a topic that almost every reader is familiar with is that we have this established baseline that I can take and twist into an entirely new realm. So the Dragonships series is dragons in space. Middle graders are constantly running up to me saying, “I’ve never thought about dragons in space.” Perfect. That’s the goal.
For Devious Prey, the dragon has this power that when she touches her claws to different substances, she can assume that substance into her being, which makes her very versatile and an incredibly deadly hunter. I love the trope of the bad guy not necessarily being right, but not being what they seem. The dragon is just doing what she’s born to do. She’s a creature that’s very haunting and intense and scary and terrifying, but at the same time, she’s not doing anything unnatural to her. She’s pursuing a hunt. I like an enemy who feels like what they’re doing is justified.
Before you became an author, you were a high school teacher. You also currently teach creative writing courses online. How does your career as an educator inform your work?
I don’t think I’d still be writing if I didn’t regularly reconnect with the educational world. The older I get, the harder it is to write YA and middle grade voices. Parts of it are universal and timeless but being a kid in contemporary society is very different than what being a kid was like in my era.
I visit anywhere from 70 to 100 schools a year, and I get to be face-to-face with students. I sit at lunches with them and talk about what books they love. I get to answer the questions that they really care about during my q&as. You have to keep listening and keep your eyes open, because I think what each generation cares about changes over time. If I ever get to the point where I’m not doing that, where I don’t have my fingers on the pulse of that, I really don’t think I should be writing for kids anymore.
I talked about this with some authors at the North Texas Teen Book Festival. We have this honorable position where we get to be the first invitation into the world of reading, and I take that quite seriously.
What’s next for you?
The third book in the Dragonships series, The Void Dragons, comes out in October. And I got the green light to start writing book four. I’m playing around with Pluto and the underworld, and the mythology associated with that—and let me tell you, it has been delightful to dip my toes into that. There are a lot of fun stories to work with and see how I can translate to dragons.
On the YA side of things, I just finished writing my next standalone novel, which is called The River Infinite. The tagline for it is, “Kill a fairy, get a miracle.” It’s a little bit darker than my previous works, and it definitely will not feature a dragon of any kind.
Devious Prey by Scott Reintgen. McElderry, $19.99 Mar. 31 ISBN 978-1-6659-7893-4
