Stefan Bachmann was born in Colorado and spent of most of his childhood in Switzerland, where he's now a student of music at the Zürich University of Arts.

His debut, gothic-faery-fantasy THE PECULIAR, was a New York Times Editor's Choice and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, and was translated into eight languages. Its companion, THE WHATNOT, was released on September 24th, 2013.

THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: 36 TALES BRIEF AND SINISTER, a collection of scary stories he wrote together with authors Emma Trevayne, Claire Legrand and Katherine Catmull, was released May 27th, 2014, from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

His next book, YA thriller A DROP OF NIGHT, about a group of American teens fighting to survive after they become trapped in an underground Versailles, will be out March 15th, 2016, also from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

LINKS: Website | Twitter A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann
Published by Greenwillow Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2016
Pre-Order: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | iBooks | Book Depository

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she's been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780's to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .

A genre-bending thriller from Stefan Bachmann for fans of The Maze Runner and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

You cannot escape the palace.

You cannot guess its secrets. Brittany: Hi Stefan! Thank you so much for doing this interview with me =)

SB: Thanks so much for the questions! ☺

Brittany: Did you always know that you wanted to be an author?

SB: I didn’t! I actually wanted to be an architect for the longest time. I even got a computer program for my birthday one year, where I could design wildly impractical buildings in 3-D. Thankfully someone warned me that architecture requires math skills (of which I have none) so I settled on studying music. That’s what I’m doing now.

Writing kind of snuck in along the way. I grew up in a house filled with books, and reading was always important to me, and at some point I guess I just realized books were the best things ever and I wanted to learn how to write one.

Brittany: What is your most memorable moment on your road to becoming a published author?

SB: When I got the email from my agent about my first book deal. I was 18 and that whole year was such a whirlwind of newness and excitement; it’s all kind of mushed together in my memory now, but that one moment I still recall really clearly: I was at my sister’s house in the Alps, and was mostly cut off from the world, and then the email came in and I screamed a little bit and went outside and stared at the mountains and was super happy. That was a good day.

Brittany: What books have influenced your life the most?

SB: The Lord of the Rings and Catherine Fisher’s short stories. Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters. Lemony Snicket, too, probably, and a lot of Russian writers. A Drop of Night is a pretty big change from my usual writing style, so I’m not sure people will see those influences here, but they’re probably in there somewhere.

Brittany: Do you have any quirky writing habits? (ex. Like always having chocolate on hand)

SB: I loooooove writing on trains. I take a train to school every morning and I’ve found it’s the ideal writing spot. It’s busy and a bit noisy, and there are sometimes weird conversations to overhear. If I could just write on a train permanently, I would.

Brittany: What is the scariest thing you’ve ever done for fun?

SB: Hiking across a glacier at 4,000 feet without any kind of rope or equipment. That was dumb, obviously, but I was a kid and so at the time I thought it was fun. I remember wondering vaguely what would happen if I fell in a hole. How I survived that and am not a frozen mummy in a Swiss glacier right now, I don’t know.

Brittany: If you could meet anyone from history, who would it be and why?

SB: Odysseus maybe? I’m just assuming he was a real person. It would be cool to see how the myths around him grew out of the actual person. Maybe he was really boring, but a great storyteller.

Brittany: Do you have any pet peeves? If so, could you share some?

SB: I get a bit rage-y when people are condescending, be it toward younger readers, or fantasy, or just things other people like. I don’t like tons of things, but if someone else does, I think that’s great.

A less dramatic pet peeve I have is that I like to walk very quickly, and when I’m with someone who walks slowly, I like, “Whyyyy aren’t we moving?”

Brittany: What is one thing that would make you stop reading a book?

SB: I’m not a picky reader. I can usually find at least one thing to enjoy about a book, and I’ll read almost any genre about any type of character. It’s rare I’ll actually throw a book across the room and never pick it up again. I guess if I think the writing isn’t great on a sentence level, I’m more likely to set a book aside. That being said, every book, even the books I’ve found unbearable, is a good book to someone, so if I do give up on one I just assume I wasn’t the reader for it and move on down the TBR stack.

Brittany: Thank you so much, Stefan, for stopping by the blog today! Guys, be sure to check out the rest of the tour schedule and the giveaway below!
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