The Locked Room
by Adam Cece
Published by Penguin Books Australia
Adam, congratulations on your riveting new YA novel, The Locked Room, which is set in an escape room. It is a highly appealing concept and will hook in many readers, including those who may not read many books.
Thank you for writing this interesting piece for PaperbarkWords blog to explain how the novel pays homage to The Breakfast Club and its director John Hughes.
Author Interview: Adam Cece
The Locked Room: A YA thriller and a YA tribute.
My new young adult novel, The Locked Room, is a tense, twisty thriller, but it is also a tribute to one of my favourite screenwriters and filmmakers, the late – great – John Hughes.
I was nine years old when the movie, The Breakfast Club (written and directed by John Hughes), was released in the US, and I was ten when I first saw it here in Australia. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a genre-defining 80s movie, about five teens, with seemingly nothing in common, all from different social cliques at their school, who are forced to spend a Saturday together in detention, and their lives are changed forever.
It is not an understatement to say this movie also changed my life forever. This wasn’t just a movie to me, it immediately altered the way I viewed the world, and it taught me so much about storytelling, and characterisation, how mundane and every day things can be interesting and hilarious, if you look closely enough, and how comedy can be used so effectively to enhance drama and emotion.
In the almost 40 years since, I must have watched The Breakfast Club 50 times – at least once a year – and many other John Hughes films too (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Career Opportunities – the list goes on and on). His movie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, is mandatory Christmas Day viewing in our household.
And when I was watching John Hughes films as a kid, I also remember this being the first time I became interested in the writer behind the films. I already knew authors of books existed, and had many favourites, but now I became interested in the writers of films too. Before the internet, I had to search long and hard to find out anything about John Hughes, and I was always hungry for any snippets of information I could gather about this mysterious person I revered. In The Breakfast Club, John cameos as main character, Brian’s, father, picking him up from school after detention. I remember I would try to pause the tape (yes it was a video tape back then) at just the right point, to try and get a glimpse of the great man in the driver’s seat.
As I got older, and anyone would ask me what my ultimate dinner party guest list would be, if I could choose from anyone throughout history, I would always grant John Hughes a seat at the table. The day I found out he had died, at only 59, it moved me way more than I could have realised, and I binged nothing but John Hughes films for a fortnight.
And as I became a writer, and a storyteller, myself, I always strove to create a cast of characters in my books as iconic, as timeless, as layered, and hilarious, as John Hughes always did. My writing style has been described as “cinematic”, and maybe that’s because I’m often visualising my books as if they were my own personal John Hughes films.
So when I sat down one day, with a nugget of an idea in my head, about characters being trapped in an escape room, which I wanted to be a tense, twisty, contained, unputdownable thriller, I knew I needed four great teen characters to pull this story off. So I started writing my story the same way I always do, simply by getting the characters to sit down and chat to each other, exploring who they are, and inevitably I started to picture this scene through a John Hughes lens. And suddenly it came to me: what if I wrote a book that was the movie The Breakfast Club, but set in an escape room! And my four, butting-heads, teen protagonists, were forced to work together, if they wanted to escape, and survive?
And that was the spark. The Locked Room has some of the classic Hughes-ian characters in it: the queen of the school, the school jock (bully), the smart kid, and the weirdo. But, like many John Hughes movies, these characters are so much more than just their labels: they are complex, and it was so much fun to explore them, their uniqueness, and their similarities, and I hope John would have approved.
The Locked Room has been described as a high concept, high stakes, high emotion, page-turner, and I’m so happy that readers are appreciating the thrill-ride I aimed to create. But I’m also hoping some readers will see that this book is also a homage to one of my favourite writers and filmmakers, and my attempt to build on his legacy.
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