Yes, it’s very much based on my own life as a boy, and much more autobiographical than most of my earlier books. Would you say that this is your most personal novel yet? There was a mass drive to build them in public places, and civil defense agencies put up those little black and yellow signs everywhere indicating underground shelters. I didn’t know it at the time, but after doing a lot of research for the book I realize there was a tremendous amount of publicity surrounding bomb shelters. I was known as the kid with the bomb shelter, and kids would tease me and ask if I’d let them in when the time came. I do know that we were the only ones in our neighborhood – we lived in Roslyn Heights – who had a bomb shelter. In 1962, was having a personal bomb shelter a rarity? What if I was in school when this happened? Would they let me run out of school to try to get home to my bomb shelter? This novel actually began when I was 12 years old, lying in bed at night wondering what I would do. The unintended consequence of that bomb shelter was that I was filled with anxiety about a nuclear war. And the first thing I saw was this incredible experience of my father building a bomb shelter in case of nuclear war. How did you come to write a novel based on that incident?įor many years, when I thought about what I wanted to write about, I took a look at what was going on in the present and took a look ahead to the future, but when I got close to turning 60, I started to look back. Obviously your father’s building of a backyard bomb shelter created an indelible memory. Strasser’s father did the same, but happily the family never had to take put the shelter to use. In the novel, set on Strasser’s Long Island, N.Y., childhood turf, Scott’s father builds the only bomb shelter in the neighborhood as the Cold War heats up in 1962. The book marks a significant milestone for the author, as it is his 100th original work of fiction (his oeuvre also includes a number of novelizations). The author drew from his own childhood to write Fallout, which Candlewick will publish September 10.

Bullying, school shootings, and homelessness are some of the weightier topics Todd Strasser has tackled in his novels, but he’s also dabbled in more lighthearted fare, including his Help! I’m Trapped… series for middle-grade readers.

Fallout by Scott Edward Cole