The eve of invasion is here, and the SK Crew is caught in the middle. The Incisors are back to redeem their child folk hero, Billy Cray, and their leader, the Chaos Master, is willing to kill everyone Mark Daley loves to get what Cray couldn’t from him. As the school year ends, Mark’s final exam will be in the streets, at last embracing his vigilante past to save his desperate present. If he doesn’t rise, Woodvale will fall. There’s nowhere left to run!
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This is, of course, a book and not a movie, but I’ve been calling it “Children of Woodvale – The Movie” since I was a senior in high school for a reason: as the tenth episode of Children of Woodvale, I always envisioned this story as a climactic moment like a made-for-TV special capping off two or three seasons of an ongoing show. As long as I’ve managed to come this far, why not finally pay off my fun with that framing?
I wrote the first draft of Bite of Chaos (in a Word document that did call it “the movie”) all the way back in 2002, pretty much right after I wrote the first real edition of Donovan’s Gauntlet. That version of Bite of Chaos stopped near the end of the next-to-last chapter without a conclusion, and despite thinking I knew what the ending would be for almost twenty years, when I finally got there in this edition, I was surprised by what came out of me. This was a fun, kinetic story to write from end-to-end, tying together not just the entire Children of Woodvale series to-date, but also one of the most pivotal first-run School Kids stories I initially came up with all the way back in sixth grade. The peculiarity of the 2002 draft being contemporary to DG and nothing else meant I had to adjust the scenarios I’d kept in mind all those years to match where the characters actually were, and what their dynamics had evolved into, after the events of Blood and Brotherhood, The Arc of Time, and Whys and Becauses. It was wonderfully rewarding to see how much the SK Crew had grown over the years, and it opened my mind to what they all might do next, as individuals and as a group.