From the New York Times bestselling author of My Dearest Darkest comes another incredible sapphic horror. When four best friends with a hunger for human flesh attend a music festival in the desert they discover a murderous plot to expose and vilify the girls and everyone like them. This summer is going to get gory.
THIS DELICIOUS DEATH
by Kayla Cottingham
Sourcebooks Fire, April 2023
Three years ago, the melting of arctic permafrost released a pathogen of unknown origin into the atmosphere, causing a small percentage of people to undergo a transformation that became known as the Hollowing. Those impacted slowly became intolerant to normal food and were only able to gain sustenance by consuming the flesh of other human beings. Those who went without flesh quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. However, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy the hunger of those impacted by the Hollowing. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal, albeit with lasting fear and distrust for the people they’d pejoratively dubbed ghouls.
Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before their graduation they decided to attend a musical festival in the desert. They have a cooler filled with hard seltzers and SynFlesh and are ready to party.
But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral, and ends up killing and eating a boy. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is drugging ghouls and making them feral. And if they can’t figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is safe..
Kayla Cottingham is a YA author and librarian. Her first book, My Dearest Darkest, was a New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly bestseller. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, Kayla lives in Boston where she loves to go hiking in the woods, play RPGs, and snuggle on the couch with her ridiculously large black cat, Squid.
Anora Silby can see the dead and turn spirits into gold coins, two things she would prefer to keep secret as she tries to lead a normal life at her new school. After all, she didn’t change her identity for nothing. Hiding her weirdness is just one of many challenges. By the end of her first day, she’s claimed the soul of a dead girl on campus and lost the coin. Turns out, the coin gives others the ability to steal souls, and when a classmate ends up dead, there’s no mistaking the murder weapon. Navigating the loss of her Poppa, the mistrust of her mother, the attention of gorgeous and enigmatic Shy, and Roundtable, an anonymous student gossip app threatening to expose her, are hard enough. Now she must find the person who stole her coin before more lives are lost, but that means making herself a target for the Order, an organization that governs the dead on Earth―and they want Anora and her powers for themselves.
As a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan’s Copper Country, Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival. That ability sustains her even now as the Second World War rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she’s the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay.
Quantum physics is weird and spooky and mystical and if you only understood it, you’d be rich and beautiful and have great sex, right? Wrong. Quantum physics is a wellunderstood science that professional bullshitters use to dupe unsuspecting victims with get-rich-quick scams and bogus self-help advice. This book is a no-nonsense explanation of what quantum physics is and is not, told in an accessible, humorous style with just the right amount of curse words. If you f*cking love science and want to be slightly less dumb than you were when you woke up this morning, this is the goddamn book for you.
On the island of Guernsey, as WWII looms, many islanders make the heartbreaking choice to ship their children to safety in England, not knowing when (or if) they will be reunited. Acting on faith, Ava and Joseph Simon reluctantly send their nine-year-old son Henry and four-year-old daughter Catherine with their children’s teacher Helen, who will escort them to the mainland. But Helen’s sister Lily is fleeing an abusive marriage, and, just as the ferry is about to leave, takes Helen’s place to make a new start for herself. It is Lily who takes them to England, and it is Lily who lets Henry get on a train by himself, deciding in a split second to walk the other way and take Catherine with her. That split-second decision lingers long after the war ends, impacting the rest of their lives.