New book baby!
- Charis Cotter
- Feb 27
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 5
The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall: May 13, 2025
This book has been a long time coming. In fact, it started when I was about seven. That’s when I first went to camp. I was one of those kids who cried the last night of camp and spent the next eleven months wishing I was back at camp. Living in a tent with kids my own age, singing at campfire, early morning swims in bathing suits still wet from the night before -- I loved it all. I remember spreading my flannel-lined sleeping bag on the grass in the sunshine for hours and then zipping it up so it would hold the warmth when I got into it at night. Eating meatloaf with ketchup and drinking green Freshie. Walking to my tent alone in the dark and not being scared.
For years I wanted to write a book set in a camp so I could go back and recapture some of that summer-camp magic from my childhood. Camp Artaban in Bolton, Ontario, where I went, was a small Anglican church camp with just a man-made pond for canoeing and a swimming pool. I needed something more exotic. One bleak winter I was housesitting a friend’s place in Toronto. I had a ringside seat in her sunroom for all the February birds that flocked to her bird feeder. Looking out the window is always more fun than working, so I spent way too much time doing just that. Gradually it dawned on me that I could make my camp a bird-watching camp, way up north.
That got me started, and I created Camp Blue Heron, founded by the 1920s ornithologist Miss Feather Linnet. Twelve-year-old Bee Griffin does not want to go to camp, and the mean kids in her tent steal her flashlight so she has to walk in the dark. A city girl, Bee is terrified of the dark and the woods, and then -- she hears a distant strain of unearthly music coming from somewhere out in the wilderness. She meets Zippy, who tells her about a baffling mystery in the camp. Together, they set out to solve it.
The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall was an absolute joy to write. It took a long time to finish, but maybe that was partly because I was back at camp again, and didn't want to leave! I am grateful to the dedicated team at Tundra Books (Penguin Random House Canada), who always make such beautiful books. And I was thrilled to have the brilliant Byron Eggenschwiler to do the creepy cover, which perfectly captures the mixture of camp fun and spookiness in my story.
I'm so excited to finally be sharing this book with my readers. I’ll be celebrating the launch with a Haunted Camp Party at the A.C. Hunter Library in St. John’s on May 13 at 6 pm. More about that later!
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