Böcker av Christa Carmen

For a grieving writer, the secrets of the past and present converge in a novel of gripping psychological suspense from the author of The Daughters of Block Island.Unmoored by her husband's death and suffering from writer's block, novelist Saoirse White moves to Providence, and into the historic home of Sarah Helen Whitman, the nineteenth-century poet and spiritualist once courted by Edgar Allan Poe. Saoirse's certain she'll find inspiration in the quiet rooms, as well as in the tucked-away rose garden and forgotten cemetery at the back of the property.Saoirse is immediately welcomed by an effusive trio of transcendentalists obsessed with Whitman, the house, and Whitman's mystic beliefs. Saoirse, emerging from grief and loneliness, welcomes the idea of new friends taking her mind off the past--even as they hope to summon it. When she meets Emmit Powell, a charismatic and charming prize-winning author, Saoirse thinks she's finally turned a corner.Emboldened by new romance, Saoirse begins to write again and, through her writing, rediscover herself. But as old fears return, she finds that nothing about her new life is what it seems--and a secret she's tried so hard to bury may not be the only thing that comes back to haunt her.

A young woman's fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows' Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she'd prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won't stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen's flair for short fiction.

Come. Take our hands. The twilight is dimming, but the moon is bright enough to see by, and it's the perfect night to go for a walk. We'll stroll through a cemetery in Exeter to where police officers are dispatched every Halloween and where a one-hundred-fifty-year-old vampire-girl is said to still roam. We'll wander the wharfs in Jamestown, but mind your footing; the sea is home to all manner of creatures just waiting to break the surface after a thousand-year sleep. And keep an eye on the Romanesque Revival windows of the mansions along Newport's Cliff Walk; you might catch a glimpse of a silhouette with no earthly reason for being there. In Providence, we'll stalk the shadowy streets along with the ghosts of transcendentalist poets and jilted lovers, but don't be surprised to discover that the monsters of Lovecraft's fiction are not, in fact, the product of his imagination. The capital city has secrets and those secrets have tentacles. And teeth.Welcome to Rhode Island, home of the weird, the hometown horror, the haunted, the hunted. Home of the Gothic and of horror with history. We promise there's something here for everyone, whether visiting or already one with the region's countless legends. Rhode Island is the smallest state but the biggest house of horrors...And the door is open.