Wed. Sept. 28  

  “I want to avoid painting this as ‘celebrity-makes-a-book,’” said Colin Meloy, author of the new young-adult novel “Wildwood.” “It’s not a vanity project for me.”
    Meloy is best-known as the lead singer-songwriter of Decemberists, the Portland, Ore.-based alt-folk-rock band. The 11-year-old group scored its first No. 1 album with “The King Is Dead,” earlier this year. Having scaled that mountain, the band is now on the shelf indefinitely.
     “The book predates what I’ve done with Decemberists, but it’s a companion to the writing in Decemberists,” Meloy said on the phone from a stop outside Chicago, where he’s on a promotional book tour. He comes to read at the Coolidge Corner Theatre Wednesday with his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis.
    Meloy said he and Ellis, who met in 1997 at the University of Montana, began working together on what became “Wildwood” years ago. They were living with other artists in a Portland warehouse while Ellis was doing illustrations for Meloy’s musical projects. They picked up the book again following Decemberists 2009 tour, after the birth of their son Hank.
    “Wildwood,” the first in a trilogy, concerns a 12-year-old girl named Prue, who enters the dreaded Impassable Wilderness – aka Wildwood – a fanciful and frightening take-off on Portland’s Forest Park. She charges in with her friend Curtis to rescue her one-year-old brother Mac, who has been snatched from his stroller by a murder of crows and taken into the forest. In Wildwood, they encounter verbal and vicious coyotes, among various creatures, human and otherwise.
   “I think it’s a folk tale, an elaborate fairy tale,” said Meloy, a childhood fan of Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl. “The people who know my music can see it as an offshoot. It’s a companion to the writing in Decemberists. While I know there’s an amount of leverage gained from my quasi-celebrity status, I want people to know this is something I’ve very keen on doing and plan on doing for the next several years.”
     Meloy’s process for writing music, he said, might involve sitting on a couch, strumming the guitar for hours, hoping something good comes along. Writing prose was more disciplined. 
    “I feel like in a weird way it’s using the same muscle,” he said, “but using the same muscle could not feel so different. It’s really hard to explain. They feel perfectly related and completely unrelated. Writing the novel was like putting in a honest day’s work, really sitting down for six to eight hours and working, like you’re chopping your way through a giant pile of split logs, whereas songwriting is so much more amorphous and elusive.”
    At more than 500 pages, “Wildwood” is a long, thick novel. “I like intensive books,” Meloy said. “I’m attracted to books that have a lot of girth. I jokingly refer to this for kids as ‘My First Doorstop.’”
    With its myriad of twists and fanciful turns, it’s a challenging book as well.
    “I guess that’s just where my sensibilities lie,” Meloy said. “I don’t necessarily feel my job is to pander or make overly accessible the ideas that I’m communicating, and I think that doesn’t change if the audience is a bunch of 25-year-olds or an eight-year-old. Hopefully, if any lesson can be learned from reading this book, not only is it an engaging adventure story, but also it shows you the rewards of a more challenging book, like the rewards of more challenging music.”
    “We really did intend it for a younger audience,” Meloy added, “but we hoped it would be complex enough so that adults could enjoy it as well. And we’re discovering now that adults like this kind of stuff, too.”
This is an expanded version of a story that ran in the Boston Herald, www.bostonherald.com today.
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