Suzanne Collins was making a successful career in TV when she met children’s author James Proimos, who convinced her that she should try giving children’s books a go. She was a huge fan of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but wondered how today’s urban generation would make of the book and its wide open spaces. She reasoned that urban children were more likely to fall down a manhole than a rabbit hole, and that was the germ of the idea for Gregor the Overlander and the subsequent four sequels. The series is based around a boy named Gregor, who stumbles upon an underground world in New York, a fantasy land filled with giant rats and cockroaches. Collins said about setting the idea under New York: ‘I like the fact that, of all the places Gregor could have travelled to, why the Underland? I liked that this world was teeming under New York City and nobody was aware of it. That you could be going along preoccupied with your own problems and then whoosh! You take a wrong turn in your laundry room and suddenly a giant cockroach is right in your face. No magic, no space or time travel, there’s just a ticket to another world behind your clothes dryer.’
Publishers Weekly raved about the first book in the series: ‘Collins does a grand job of world-building, with a fine economy of words… Unlike Gregor, who cannot wait to leave, readers will likely find the Underland to be a fantastically engaging place.’
Despite the book’s success, Collins admits, after working on scripts for years, that she struggled to adapt to writing a novel rather than TV work. She recalled: ‘I think I started the first Gregor book, Gregor the Overlander, when I was 38. I’d be clicking along through dialogue and action sequences. That’s fine, that’s like stage directions. But whenever I hit a descriptive passage, it was like running into a wall. I remember particularly there’s a moment early on when Gregor walks through this curtain of moths, and he gets his first look at the underground city of Regalia. So it’s this descriptive scene of the city. Wow, did that take me a long time to write! And I went back and looked at it. It’s just a couple of paragraphs. It killed me. It took forever.’
She also spent hours on the phone with her military father, desperate for a strategic viewpoint. She reasoned: ‘We had two superpowers, the humans and the bats, but the humans were dependent on the alliance with the bats, because then they became aerial fighters.’