Dark-Hunter author Sherrilyn Kenyon has her own story of poverty, abuse and homelessness

Screaming through tears, the little girl begged her father to stop.

“Daddy, Daddy, don’t burn my Barbie dolls up!” the girl shrieked when her father grabbed her dollhouse to bring it outside and set it on fire.

Her dad didn’t relent.

Angry that his daughter hadn’t cleaned her room, he grabbed her toys, threw all her dolls into her dollhouse, and carried them outside to teach her a lesson.

“He burned all of them,” Sherrilyn Kenyon said softly, shaking her head more than 45 years later.

Kenyon, best-selling author of millions of the Dark-Hunter fantasy books, still is traumatized from the horrors of her childhood and homelessness in her early years of marriage.

Physical and verbal abuse. Abandonment. Poverty. Deception.

She grew up thinking her violent grandparents probably would kill her, hoping and praying she’d make it to 18 so she could escape her abusers once and for all.

“I thought, ‘I’m probably not going to survive, but I’m going to try,’” she said.

So Kenyon started reading and writing fiction as an escape — and as a way to create the heroes she desperately was seeking for herself.

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'Very noisy, but it was lonely'

Kenyon grew up in Georgia, the fourth of five children of a U.S. Army sergeant and a mother who fought with each other constantly.

Her older sister Trish grew up with cerebral palsy and other conditions that sparked regular loud outbursts.

The family eventually took in an uncle’s seven kids, meaning 14 people lived in an 800-square-foot house with one bathroom.

“I hated parts of my childhood,” Kenyon, 52, said. “We had a lot of people in the house and it was very noisy, but it was lonely.”

Her parents often hit and threw food at each other, while screaming.

“I’m gonna skin you alive the minute you fall asleep!” her mother once shouted at her father.

Kenyon remembers her mother –– with all of the children in the car — trying to run over her father.

The police came over so often that Kenyon remembers befriending “Officer Mike,” who would pull her out of the house and give her a lollipop.

Even after her parents split when she was 8, the chaos continued.

Kenyon said her maternal grandparents often beat her, cutting her so badly several times with Hot Wheel tracks that Kenyon would bleed through her jeans.

Friends rarely went to Kenyon’s house, always getting a chilly reception if they did.

“I remember being terrified just driving up the driveway,” childhood friend Sheri Jacobs said.

“You’d see the grandmother or the mother just standing there, defying you to get closer.”

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Kenyon often went to sleep listening to Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne cranked up in her headphones to try to block out the pounding, shouting and crashing in other parts of the house.

'As a small kid, you can slay the dragons'

And she started writing, and writing and writing. It helped her to process the violence and angry words all around her.

“That’s why my books have a lot of dark places in them. I find that therapeutic,” she said. “As a small kid, you can slay the dragons. It was what gave me control.”

Kenyon became a library aide during the school year, and she’d spend hours in the community library in the summer, often reading two or three books a day.

Science fiction, fantasy, mythology, anything medieval, “the more ancient, the better.”

Kenyon’s first literary creation: a cartoon strip vampire story. Then, she wrote about space aliens taking over her school’s gym.

Teachers encouraged her, and Kenyon eventually landed spots at the school newspaper and yearbook at North Clayton High School.

She held dozens of jobs to pay for college — DJ, resident assistant in the dorms, drugstore clerk, tutor, videographer, babysitter. Kenyon couldn’t afford college meal plans, so friends would smuggle apples and other snacks out of the cafeteria for her.

She got married in 1990 in a goat pasture to another student she’d met in sociology class. Money continued to be tight, though Kenyon had been getting articles published in magazines and even landed a small deal to publish a few books.

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Homeless

Her husband decided to go to law school, in Jackson, Miss., and shortly after he graduated — after having a baby — their finances crashed. They lost their house.

Pregnant with a second child, Kenyon, her husband and the baby lived out of their Ford Mustang for a few months. During the day, her husband took the car to work, while Kenyon and her baby hung out at the local hospital emergency room or a park or library. She often bathed the baby in a bathroom sink.

The family eventually found a run-down apartment, and Kenyon re-launched her book deal after that, in the late 1990s.

She continued to get out anger about her childhood and her rocky early years of marriage through her popular Dark-Hunter books and others.

“Writing was my outlet for it. My anger went out on the page. You have to let it out,” she said. “You have to have a pressure valve somewhere.”

But it was not enough.

She now lives with her children in a beautiful subdivision in Franklin, Tenn., but she is still haunted by her past.

Her friend Jacobs, who does some work for the author, calls Kenyon “very guarded.”

“She never gets a moment’s rest or peace,” Jacobs said.

Kenyon, in the middle of a divorce, said she finds herself looking over her shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I don’t know if I believe in happy endings anymore,” she said.

“I like to tell my kids I still do, but mine was stolen, so I don’t think I do.”

Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384 or on Twitter @bradschmitt.

Kenyon and her Menyons to hit Nashville's Hypericon

What: Hypericon fantasy, sci-fi and gaming convention, featuring author Sherrilyn Kenyon and her fans, known as Menyons

Where: Nashville Airport Marriott, 600 Marriott Drive

When: July 6-8

Cost: $52 for a three-day pass, $32 for one day

Info and registration: Hypericon.net