When we met with Frank Portman to talk about his second YA novel, Andromeda Klein, we joked that it was a banned book waiting to happen… (Little did we know that, no joke, one school in Portland had already cancelled his appearance because of the book’s occult themes.)
Portman told us a bit about the tarot imagery that permeates the novel, which centers on a teenage girl (and practicing ceremonial magician) still coping with the death of her friend, and we went from there to talking about the accuracy of the story’s handling of occultism in general. “I thought I knew a lot about it when I started,” Portman admitted, “but I still had to do all kinds of research. It was a crazy odyssey… To write a novel about an obsessive character like Andromeda, you have to know a lot.” Rather than simply use the magic as a framing device or a plot point, he strove to make it both integral to the narrative and absolutely real—but in a way that still allows skeptical readers to accept what happened to Andromeda as manifestations from her own subconscious fueled by her voracious reading on the subject.
Andromeda’s efforts to preserve the occult section of her town’s public library are a major part of the story, and Portman was quick to point out how much reading and book collecting shapes modern-day magick. “Everybody in that world is very proud of their collection,” he said; the rarer the books, the better. “It’s a lot like record collecting.”
Speakng of record collecting, Andromeda Klein has a theme song (complete with references to Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft), which is also available as a 7-inch single. For the longest time, he revealed, he wasn’t sure what his character’s main name was. “Her name came to me while I was standing in line for bagels, and as soon as I thought the name, I had the tune for the song—all sorts of answers about her personality came from that.”