How My Chemical Romance Inspired Dana Schwartz's Latest Novel – Bustle

The Martian Chronicles. Ender’s Game. Oryx and Crake. These were the genre-leaning, heavy-on-the-adventure types of books that shaped novelist (and Bustle columnist) Dana Schwartz in her youth. “I grew up loving authors who are able to tell very grounded human stories in fantastical worlds,” she tells Bustle. “I also loved The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood is really good at spanning that chasm between literary fiction and genre.”Schwartz first cut her teeth with a series of humorous books. The comedic memoir, Choose Your Own Disaster; the satirical White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon. But now she’s publishing her first entry into the canon of genre fiction, an homage to the mysterious and macabre tales that enchanted Schwartz throughout her adolescence. “My impulse as a writer is just to do what I’m most excited about,” she says. “Because the thing about writing a book is you have to spend a very long time in this world with every character.”The result is Anatomy: A Love Story, which centers on two teenagers in 19th century Scotland: Hazel (a would-be surgeon) and Jack (a body snatcher). Together they solve mysteries, exhume corpses, and, of course, dabble in romance. And the…
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