An Evil Premise
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
From T. Marie Vandelly, author of the acclaimed horror novel Theme Music, An Evil Premise is a mind-bending, thrilling metanovel about possession, insanity, and the lengths a writer will go to find inspiration.
When a bizarre accident leaves her sister, bestselling author Deidre Baldwin, in a coma and suffering from a grotesque skin malady, Jewel rushes to her bedside. Though the sisters are not close, she is determined to do what she can for Deidre. Staying at her sister’s apartment, Jewel stumbles upon an unfinished manuscript, the one that Deidre was rushing to complete for her publisher. When Deidre’s literary agent calls in a panic, Jewel—a self-published writer herself, desperate for a break—suggests she can finish it by the deadline.
But the story is unsettling. It begins with a writer looking for inspiration, who finds an unclaimed manuscript. But said manuscript is just a series of protagonists who feel compelled to act out their heinous contributions to the grisly plot.
Jewel is determined not to be scared off, but the novel hits a little close to home. She tries to tell herself she’s being paranoid, but swears she can hear someone typing when she’s not at the desk, and somehow the word count of the novel keeps going up. Her skin begins to itch.
Terrified of losing her sanity, but equally terrified of losing her one shot at success, Jewel tries to find a story somewhere in the carnage, even as her rash becomes worse and she starts to have not-so-neighborly thoughts about her neighbors. Is this what happened to Deidre? Did the manuscript drive her mad? Infect her somehow? Jewel finds herself hoping her sister never wakes up. And fearing what will happen if Deidre does …
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vandelly (Theme Music) crafts a sinuous thriller whose protagonist is bedeviled—literally—by the horror novel she's trying to write. For years, self-published author Jewel Maxwell has labored in the shadow of her more successful sister, Deidre Baldwin, a bestselling fantasy writer. When Jewel rushes to her comatose sister's side in Virginia following a near-fatal hit-and-run, she stumbles on the opportunity of a lifetime: Deidre's latest manuscript is up against her publisher's deadline, and her agent is desperate to have someone finish it. Jewel takes on the job, but soon has reservations: Deidre's novel, a horror potboiler with the working title Unspeakable Demons, appears to have a life of its own, self-generating paragraphs of text when Jewel isn't looking and infecting her with the impulse to commit the bloody atrocities that fill its pages. Jewel's conclusion—that the muse driving the novel's creation is a demon determined to infect not only its author but anyone who reads it—traps her in a moral dilemma. Though Jewel's travails become repetitive as the story progresses, they set the stage for a twist ending that will leave readers who've locked into her narrative pleasantly surprised. The result is sure to entertain anyone who has pondered the imaginative impact of reading horror fiction.
