Black Swan meets The Devil Wears Prada in this creepy horror about fashion, about sexuality as a commodity, and the power wielded by men trying to harness it.
TINY THREADS
by Lilliam Rivera
Del Rey, March 2023
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)
After the death of her grandmother, Samara Martín leaves her overbearing Cuban family behind in New Jersey for a job at a once-edgy fashion brand in Vernon, California. Touted as up-and-coming, Vernon turns out to be eerily desolate, made worse by the foul-smelling slaughterhouse near the office.
Trying to navigate office politics by appeasing her volatile boss, Samara throws all her focus into an upcoming runway show. But there are other forces at play; she finds names stitched into garments in the archive that disappear the next day, she starts having visions of a young girl that grow increasingly disturbing—and there’s Brandon Hernandez Murphy, a charming tech investor keen on reinventing Vernon who Samara finds herself drawn to.
Samara starts to hide her increasing instability by drinking more, casting aside her family’s warnings, but when the runway show is a success, the guardrails come off entirely. The afterparty is extreme in all senses: beauty, drugs, and sex—and Samara succumbs to every vice. But her visions aren’t through with her yet. They lead her to a disturbing discovery and a violent confrontation with consequences for both Samara’s world, and the world of the supernatural.
Lilliam Rivera draws upon her experiences as a founding editor of Latina magazine to examine the dark side of glamour and deliver a haunting story. She is also an award-winning writer and author of numerous young adult novels, including The Education of Margot Sanchez, We Light Up the Sky, Never Look Back, and Dealing In Dreams. She is also author of the middle grade Goldie Vance books. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.
Welcome to Spooky Time, the hit TV ghost hunting show where the horror is scripted…and the ratings are declining rapidly. What better way to up the stakes—and boost the viewership—than by locking a select group of Z-list celebrities up for the night in The Most Haunted Hall in England (TM) and live-streaming the « terrifying » results?
It’s 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with…normal business. The dead die. You bury them. End of story. That’s how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny—Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore’s soft-hearted daughter—have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter, Luna, alone. But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy’s body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it’s clear that the Strigoi—the original vampire—are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town. As more folks in town turn up dead, and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi’s return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes the dead aren’t the only things you want to keep buried. A crackling mystery-horror novel with big-hearted characters and blood-soaked Southern charm, Bless Your Heart is a gasp-worthy delight from start to finish.
Seven years ago, Cordelia Scott’s abusive father left without a word, and life has been normal ever since. The seventeen-year-old spends her days stage managing the school play (which is going great, if anyone asks), pining over her best friend, Veronica, and failing one too many pop quizzes.
The Soler sisters are infamous in polite society―brazen, rebellious, and raised by their fashionable grandmother who couldn’t care less about which fork goes where. But their grandmother also knows the standards that two Latina young ladies will be held to, so she secures them two coveted places at the Alarie House, a prominent finishing school that turns out first ladies, princesses, and socialites.