Today I have my third and final creepy book giveaway of the week. I also have a guest post from the author! Read on, friends!
About the Book:
Romance, friendship, and dark, bone-chilling fear fill the pages of a summertime thriller in the spirit of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Twelve years ago Stella and Jeanie vanished while picking strawberries. Stella returned minutes later, with no memory of what happened. Jeanie was never seen or heard from again.
Now Stella is seventeen, and she’s over it. She’s the lucky one who survived, and sure, the case is still cloaked in mystery—and it’s her small town’s ugly legacy—but Stella is focused on the coming summer. She’s got a great best friend, a hookup with an irresistibly crooked smile, and two months of beach days stretching out before her. Then along comes a corpse, a little girl who washes up in an ancient cemetery after a mudslide, and who has red hair just like Jeanie did. Suddenly memories of that haunting day begin to return, and when Stella discovers that other red-headed girls have gone missing as well, she begins to suspect that something sinister is at work. And before the summer ends, Stella will learn the hard way that if you hunt for monsters, you will find them.
Guest Post:
My Fav Lines from THE CREEPING & Inspiration
by Alexandra Sirowy
I play favorites – can’t help it. There are lines in my debut YA thriller, THE CREEPING, that stand out to me as lines and scenes that I couldn’t imagine my book and its characters without.
Here are a few of my favorite spooky lines and the sometimes dark and disturbing inspiration behind them.
“If you hunt for monsters, you’ll find them.”
I loved this line so bloody much that we made it the tagline on my book cover. It was actually one of the first sentences that popped into my head as I was writing THE CREEPING and I furiously typed it out in the notes doc I leave open for random bits I know I must find a home for later on in the novel I’m working on. Where did it come from? Some deep, dark, undeniable corner of my brain. While it surely means a lot to me – I’ll be the first to say that we live in a world that can be bleak at times (you need only to watch the news to know this) – I do wish that I’d added another line in response. I wish that at some point I had thought of having Stella say (or maybe this is the sort of optimistic and wise thing the adorkable Sam would say?): If you search for goodness, you’ll find it or If you look for heroes, you’ll find them. Because although there are monsters of a kind in THE CREEPING, there is also bravery.
“The body’s tiny hand, outstretched and decorated with peeling nail polish, momentarily rotted my sense. I was certain she was connected to Jeanie. It felt too cosmic that on this day of all days a corpse would show up.”
I like things that don’t quite fit in. Maybe because I don’t quite fit in? Regardless, I’m taken with books that make you think, What is this glorious, insane thing? When I sat down to write THE CREEPING I wasn’t going to be preoccupied with making the book fit in one genre or another. A romance developed on the pages, friendships were tested, clues were followed, and evils were braved. I was determined to follow the story wherever it wanted to go and that turned out to be in an in-between world of sorts. THE CREEPING is a thriller but it also has elements of horror, mystery, and contemporary novels.
This line was where that real vs. the imagined concoction begins. For the first time in the story, main character Stella is questioning reality and herself because she senses some big, sinister, and unnatural thing at play. How couldn’t she? The fresh corpse of a little girl, one with eerie similarities to six-year-old and red headed Jeanie who disappeared eleven years ago, is found after a storm and resulting mudslide destroys an ancient graveyard and breaks up the nearby lakeside bonfire of reveling teens.
“The confusion of vines seem darker and greener than the muted shrubbery along the drive. I can’t tell if the bramble’s strangling the strawberries, or boosting them up as a lattice would and protecting them from greedy hands with their thorns. I’m seized by an awful fantasy that the bramble’s protecting the fruit from something worse.”
You wouldn’t know it by all my foreboding descriptions of nature, but I don’t shy away from running through the woods at dusk, I seek them out. There’s nowhere I’m able to think as deeply and freely as when I’m outdoors, preferably at twilight. But there has always been something near-magical to me about forests. They’re often the kind of isolated and silent places that allow you to really listen, to let your mind wander, to experience an almost animal sense of fear as you dodge between trunks, trying to beat the falling night back to your car.
Stella and Jeanie were picking strawberries along the woods eleven years ago when Jeanie vanished. Stella hasn’t been back to that spot since. I wanted these strawberries to seem almost supernaturally imbued to Stella – they witnessed what happened to Jeanie and whoever or whatever took her.
“I avoid my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I get ready for Sam and the library. There’s some flash in my stare that unnerves me, that’s entirely other to me. Did Jeanie know that something bad was going to happen?”
I love unreliable narrators, especially those who don’t realize that they’re unreliable. Stella isn’t this way out of malice or scheming like a lot of the protagonists showing up in thrillers. And she isn’t merely unreliable because she can’t remember what happened to Jeanie. She’s getting caught in the downward spiral of solving a mystery and suspecting those around her of twisted, dark deeds. She’s even beginning to question herself. She’s the kind of unreliable that any of us could be in the right circumstances.
I’d love to hear what your favorite quotes are from THE CREEPING – tweet them to me! @alexandrasirowy
About the Author:
Alexandra lives in a small town in Northern California. Although it’s fringed by forests and foothills like the town of Savage in THE CREEPING, it doesn’t have as many secrets (she thinks) or as dark of a history (fingers crossed). In addition to writing fiction, she loves traveling (Istanbul is her favorite), trees, lighthouses, seven layer cakes (who doesn’t?), running at dusk, music (the kind that makes your chest swell), and risky adventures. THE CREEPING is her debut novel. To learn more, visit her at alexandrasirowy.com and follow @AlexandraSirowy.
Giveaway:
I have a signed copy of the book plus some of the characters’ favorite candy and a bookmark for giveaway! US only. Must be 13 or older.
Audrey Greathouse
Ahhh! This sounds like my kind of creep-level. Everyone is posting horror novels for Halloween and it’s just too much for me…but this sounds more eerie than terrifying. Fingers crossed for that giveaway 🙂