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Author Lurlene McDaniel has written so many books, I’ve lost count. She’s one of those authors whose works you can only quantify as “over (however many) books.” Her official biography says over 40, to which I say, well over 40. I haven’t read her recent releases, but I think I pretty much exhausted her backlist back when I was in middle school. One thing that always struck me when reading her novels was how strong her characters were, or became throughout the (usually heartbreaking) course of the book. It was her work that made me look at medicine as a possible career path, and it was her work that kept me reading compulsively after I outgrew BSC.

After the enormous success of Fear Street, Stine and Parachute went on to launch Goosebumps

Harry Mazer's The Last Mission is drawn closely from his experiences as a seventeen-year-old in the Army Air Corps. Like Jack, he was a Jewish boy from the Bronx full of fantasies about heroism, and like Jack, he became a waist gunner and never fired his guns. He remembers, "I was scared every time we flew....On our 26th mission we flew over Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, to bomb the Skoda Munitions Works. We missed our target, turned over the target again, and were hit. I saw Mike, who was our radio operator, frozen in the door of the radio room. He never made it out of the plane. Only three of us parachuted....No one in the plane lived." ( ALAN Review, Fall 1980) Harry Mazer is the editor of Twelve Shots: Outstanding Short Stories About Guns, where twelve authors explore the extreme emotions that guns provoke in all of us. Walter Dean Myers, Rita Williams-Garcia, Richard Peck and other well-known authors create a riveting collection of short fiction that explores the emotion-driven world of guns.

Mazer came from a family of hard-working Polish-Jewish immigrants. Both parents worked in factories, and a young boy's dream of becoming a writer was not given much credence. "Reading was my great pleasure. I was very interested in every library I ever...