“Whip-smart dialogue... genuinely terrifying Splinters, the descriptions of which will have fans of monster films utterly enthralled... A promising series opener, this will satisfy those readers who like their scary stories to be as clever as they are chilling." —KQG, the Bulletin of The Center for Children's Books.
Release Date: June 6th. 2017
Under normal circumstances, Ben and Mina would never have had reason to speak to each other. He’s an easy-going people person with a healthy skepticism about the paranormal; she’s a dangerously obsessive monster-hunter with a crippling fear of betrayal. But the small Northern California town of Prospero, with its rich history of cryptid sightings, miracles, and mysterious disappearances, has no normal circumstances to offer.
When Ben’s missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, stumbles out of Prospero’s surrounding woods and right into her own funeral, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Different as they are, their unlikely friendship may be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
“A snapping, crackling, popping homage to classic horror.” —Kirkus Reviews.
“The stakes are high. The action is intense." —Washington Independent Review of Books.
“A snapping, crackling, popping homage to classic horror.” —Kirkus Reviews.
“The stakes are high. The action is intense." —Washington Independent Review of Books.
EXCERPT
Ben
I’d
never been to a funeral without a casket before.
Then
again, I’d never known a missing person before.
This trip
was full of firsts.
The
funeral home had managed to fit about eighty folding chairs into their cramped,
stuffy parlor, and they were all full of mourners and well-wishers. This
wouldn’t have been so bad if the funeral director’s promise of having the air
conditioning fixed in twenty minutes had actually been true. The mid-summer
heat had transformed the room into a pressure cooker that smelled heavily of
sweat and flowers. I couldn’t leave. I wanted to, if only for a minute so I
could clear my head, but I couldn’t because I had to be there for my mother,
and she had to be there for the dead girl’s mother.
Missing. Not dead. Missing.
Where a
casket would have been stood a large yearbook picture of a pretty blonde girl
wearing a nice, not-too-fancy dress. Her smile was gorgeous and hopeful,
unaware that less than a year after the picture was taken it would be blown up
and surrounded by more flowers and teddy bears than you could count.
Haley
Perkins.
We were
friends, once. Not close friends, not even good friends—when we were both six,
we’d liked each other well enough, and, since my mother was best friends in
college with her mother, we got used to playing together during my mother’s
infrequent trips to Prospero. It didn’t last long, as we each soon entered the
age where playing with the opposite sex was considered gross, but we were nice
enough to smile and say hello and spend a few polite minutes together whenever
our mothers would force us to.
I
wasn’t that choked up about her death
(disappearance), but there was still
something surreal about actually knowing the person whose funeral you’re
attending.
The
program said that the services were set to begin in ten minutes. Some of
Haley’s friends and my mother would deliver eulogies about how lovely and special
a girl she was, about how she had brightened all of their lives, and how the
world would be a much worse place for not having her in it. Standard stuff. The
kind of stuff that would break any audience into a chorus of tears and moans of
grief.
Any
normal audience at least. This audience’s behavior was anything but normal.
Don’t
get me wrong, there was plenty of sadness to go around. About half the
audience, mostly high school-aged, probably Haley’s friends, were emotional
and, if not already crying, were on the verge of tears. The older members of
the audience, on the other hand, the parents, the select representatives of the
Town Council who had decided to attend… their reactions were a bit off. While
most of them put their best sad faces on, more than anything else there seemed
to be an air of fear, even frustration as they occasionally whispered amongst
themselves. Even stranger, I could swear that a few of the older people looked happy, as if this were a day of
celebration instead of mourning.
This is
why I never really looked forward to Mom’s trips to Prospero; it’s just oozing
with small town strange. Big city strange I can deal with. I expect it. In all
the noise and anonymity, I can avoid it.
Small
town strange is another beast entirely, that kind of strange where you know,
you just know that everybody’s
watching you and judging your every move… I don’t know how anyone could handle
that for long without going completely insane. Top it off with Prospero’s
tourist-friendly reputation for the bizarre….
I
needed some air. I tugged on my mother’s sleeve.
“Mom?”
She
looked at me, daubing her puffy eyes with a tissue, “Yes, Ben?”
“Can I
go get some water?”
She
smiled, faintly, looking to the woman wrapped in her arms, “Sure. Could you get
a cup for me and your Aunt Christine as well?”
“Sure,”
I said as I got up and walked down the center aisle. Late arrivals milled
around the back. Among them was a gawky-looking girl in a long-sleeved black
dress that might have belonged to her grandmother, who looked like she had only
been told how dresses worked just in time for this memorial service. Her curly
red hair hung haphazardly around her face, a striking contrast against her pale
skin. A pair of thick, black-framed glasses made her eyes look enormous.
I
couldn’t be sure, but she seemed to be staring intently at me as I walked into
the next room. I’d have been unsettled even if the town itself hadn’t already
put me on edge.
In the
next parlor over, a buffet table had been set out with a selection of hors
d’oeuvres and bottles of water in ice. I grabbed a few, cracked one open, and
took a long, grateful sip.
When I
turned to head back to the service, the red-haired girl was standing in my way.
I was startled, almost dropping my bottle to the floor. Up close, I could see
that she stood barely five feet tall, and if it hadn’t been for the intensity
of her gaze, I could almost have tripped over her before noticing she was
there. She didn’t move.
“Hi,” I
said.
“Hi,”
she replied. An awkward silence followed. Though I could already tell she was
hardly the world’s greatest conversationalist, given the day, I wanted to be
polite.
“I’m
Ben,” I said, holding out my hand.
She
didn’t take it. She only said, “I know.”
Again,
that unsettled feeling was grabbing my stomach, but being too polite for my own
good, I couldn’t act on it. “Well, then you’ve got me at a disadvantage?”
“Mina.
Mina Todd,” she said quickly, her eyes leaving me for a moment as if worried
someone might overhear her. Satisfied that she was clear, she smiled briefly.
As odd-looking as she was, she had a radiant smile.
“Did
you… did you know Haley well?” I asked. Though this could have been a
minefield, it did seem like the safest conversation topic.
“Better
than she knew me,” Mina said, shrugging.
She did
not elaborate.
This
was getting a little too weird for my tastes. I could have doubled back into
the parlor easily, but considering the stifling heat, I decided on a different
approach. I reached for my pocket, pulled out my phone, and forced a surprised
look on my face.
“My
phone’s vibrating, I’ll be right back.”
“No it
isn’t,” she said simply.
“It’s
very quiet,” I explained, starting to turn away from her to make my escape.
“No it
isn’t,” she repeated. She looked at me, worried, clearly wanting to say more.
She was weird, I understood that, but something really had her on edge.
I
quickened my pace. Thankfully, she didn’t follow.
It was
nice outside. Hot, but nice. A faint breeze brought in the scent of the redwood
trees that surrounded Prospero. I realized then that, Prospero’s strangeness
aside, I could probably deal with summer in Northern California, better than a
lot of the places we’d lived at least. Better than Virginia and Texas, and
those three weeks we spent in Phoenix. That quick escape was one of the few times
I was glad my mom liked to move around so much.
I
sighed, took another sip of water. This trip was another excuse. I knew it. Mom
wasn’t happy with her job and she hated our landlord. When she said we were
coming up here to offer comfort to Aunt Christine and she didn’t know how long
we’d stay, I knew, I just knew that
it would be her way of quitting her job. Something would happen, she’d decide
to stay longer, and then, the way she had at least once every two years since
Dad died, she’d say it was time for a change.
If it
had been funny, I’d have laughed. Instead, I kicked a stone across the funeral
home’s parking lot. It bounced harmlessly off the tire of a Jeep parked near
the exit. I watched it skip out into the street, wondering how far it would go.
Then I
saw her.
There
was a girl walking down the middle of the street, dirty and barefoot, wrapped
in a tattered old Army blanket. She looked like a zombie, unmindful of the cuts
on her feet, how little the blanket covered up her probably naked form, and the
car that was barreling down the road toward her.
It was
going too fast, and the driver wouldn’t see her in time around the blind
corner.
I
didn’t think; I just ran.
The car
rounded the corner.
The
squealing of brakes filled the air.
I
collided with the girl, knocking her off her feet. We fell into a ditch full of
dry pine needles by the side of the road. The car swerved, missed us by inches
and ran into a lamp post in front of the funeral home. Its hood crunched inward
and glass scattered everywhere. I don’t know what was louder; the unending
blare of its horn after the impact, or the sound of the lamppost falling down
and crunching another car in the parking lot.
Someone
screamed.
I
looked down at the girl, rolling off her when I realized, shamefacedly, that
she had broken my fall.
“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I meant to do that better. Are you all right?”
She was
coming out of her trance. The vacant gaze was soon replaced by the look of a
person coming out of a deep slumber.
Sitting
up, I repeated, “Are you all ri—”
Then I
saw her face. She’d lost some weight, needed a shower and some shampoo, and was
a little bloody, but there was no denying it was her.
“Haley?”
I asked.
Her
eyes focused on me, shocked and fearful. Letting out an animalistic scream of
grief and fear, she wrapped her arms powerfully around me and wept. Comforting
crying girls had never been one of my strong suits, let alone beautiful girls
who’d been missing for two months and declared legally dead and then showed up
naked outside their own memorial services. I like to think I did my best as she
hung on to me.
People
from the service had started filing outside, checking out the accident. Some
were already calling 911, which gave me one less thing to do, thankfully.
“Can
you walk?” I asked, getting only loud sobs in response. I took that as a no.
Carefully,
I cradled Haley in my arms and picked her up, making sure the blanket covered
her. She was so light. Too light. As quickly as I could, I made my way to the
accident site and the crowd that had gathered around it.
“We
need help here!” I called.
With a
car accident to look at, they noticed us slowly, but when they did, we were
swarmed. There were all the reactions you’d expect on an occasion like this.
Shock. Excitement. Elation. I set her down, and though she regained her footing
for a moment, she soon sat down on the curb, holding the blanket around her
protectively as people hugged her, questioned her, or just stood around crying.
People called for her mother, and soon she came running out with my mom in tow.
Aunt
Christine screamed in surprise, tears of joy running down her cheeks as she
wrapped her arms around Haley and me. She babbled incoherently as she kissed
first Haley, then me on the cheek, and though I was soon pulled aside by the
crowd for congratulations from a couple dozen strangers, I did catch her saying
the words “Thank you” and “hero.”
Within
minutes there was a police car parked in front of the funeral home and, five
minutes after that, an ambulance to take Haley and the driver to the nearby
medical center. By then I’d had my hand shaken and my back pounded so many
times I was thinking of asking for a ride over there with them.
It was
right around the time they started to load Haley into the back of the ambulance
that I felt the insistent poking on the back of my shoulder. I turned around,
expecting another well-wisher or congratulatory handshake.
Instead,
I got Mina Todd. She looked at me, almost frantic, as she wrote furiously on
her funeral program with a marker and thrust it into my hands.
“We
can’t talk here. It’s not safe. Just… call me, okay?”
Before
I could ask what she meant, she darted off into the crowd and disappeared. I
looked back to Haley as she was loaded into the ambulance. She smiled at me,
grateful, and for a moment, it almost looked like she said “Thank you.”
I was a
hero. A hero. I gotta say, it felt
pretty good. They wouldn’t call me a hero for much longer, not the guy who just
saw her wandering in the street and decided to help, but I was going to enjoy
it while they did.
It was
almost an afterthought when I finally looked at the message Mina had scrawled
on the back of her funeral program. Beneath her phone number, in large block
letters, she had printed three simple words.
THAT
ISN’T HALEY
The Splinters ebook is on sale for only $0.99 now through July 6th!
Goodreads ** Smashwords ** Createspace ** Amazon ** Barnes&Noble ** iTunes ** Kobo ** Google Play ** Indigo ** Books-a-Million ** Indiebound
About the authors:
F.J.R. TITCHENELL is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of). She graduated from Cal State University Los Angeles with a B. A. in English in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband, coauthor, and amazing partner in all things, Matt Carter, and their pet king snake, Mica.
MATT CARTER is an author of horror, sci-fi, and yes, even a little bit of young adult fiction. He earned his degree in history from Cal State University Los Angeles, and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, California, with his wife, best friend, and awesome co-writer, F.J.R. Titchenell. Check out his first solo novel, Almost Infamous, or connect with him on:
Authors' Giveaway
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment