With horror on the bestseller list

“Scary Harry, the Grim Reaper” and “Vincent, the Bat” – Kaiblinger conquered its young audience with characters like these. Her mostly creepy fictional characters currently live on in 30 books and a total of ten book series. The children's book author has been inventing her stories in Kempten for two years.

But the ghosts began twelve years ago in the house in Lower Austria where the author grew up. The house is over 100 years old, very rotten and makes a lot of noise, which she was inspired to do when she visited her mother when she was 25 or 26 years old. “That's how I encountered 'Scary Harry' in his creepy house,” Kiplinger said.

Books translated into twelve languages

Scary Harry lives in the same house as Vincent the Bat. As a Grim Reaper who fights evil with Otto and Emily, he is already present in the tenth volume. In 2012 he helped break through as a children's book author. “Scary Harry” has now been translated into a dozen languages, and she continues to receive letters from readers requesting a new volume, the author says. The letters come from different parts of the world, one of them recently arrived from South Africa.

Kiplinger is sure that he will also find inspiration in Burgenland. A few months ago, the author, who has won the Leipzig Reading Prize twice and the Austrian Library Association's Reading Voices Prize once, became a mother to her son. The fourth volume of “Vincent” will be published in the spring.