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This is my post during the blog tour for Shadowdays by Polly Schattel. In Shadowdays a nurse with a troubled past becomes ensnared in a clash with a violent gang.
This blog tour is organized by Lola’s Blog Tours and the tour runs from 2 till 15 May. You can see the tour schedule here.
Shadowdays
By Polly Schattel
Genre: Psychological Horror
Age category: Adult
Release Date: 28 January 2022
Blurb:
On the dark side of town, what’s past is never really past. And what’s buried is never really dead.Melissa Sweet is in a delicate state. She’s a clinical nurse in a small town who, after a career-ending accident and the accusations of foul play that followed, is just now starting to put her life back together. She’s got her mom, her troubled brother, and her fiancé Jack to keep her grounded, and right now she’s taking life one uneasy day at a time. But tormented by a harrowing act of violence, she makes an impulsive move that changes her life—and the lives of those she loves—forever. This unleashes a disorienting cycle of brutality and revelation as she reckons with the blood of her own past and the blood of those who transgressed against her.
And it will force Melissa to confront the fiercest, most unrelenting monster of all: herself.
Links:
– Goodreads
– Bookbub
– Amazon
Praise for Shadowdays:
“… a tale that will leave readers squirming in discomfort but unable to stop turning the pages” –Booklist.
“Shadowdays will have you walking a razor’s edge between what’s real and what’s not. Either will break your heart. Schattel teaches you the meaning of guilt, and of grief, at a pace that leaves you breathless. This is pulp horror soaked in empathy, and it will cut you.” –Sarah Read, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Bone Weaver’s Orchard.
“Shadowdays has a gutpunch of an ending. You’ll see it starting to move in that direction in the novel’s climax, but it will hit you like a runaway freight train when it does. As dark as this one was—perhaps because of that—Shadowdays was a lot of fun. Recommended.” –Andrew Byers, Uncanny Books
Enjoy this peek inside
The doorbell rang, and Noah lurched into the next room, and Sandra dashed after him, to
intercede in case he started making trouble for whoever was at the door. It wouldn’t be the first
time. Once two years ago Noah pitched a fit at a UPS delivery guy, had assaulted the man after
there’d been some missed or broken communication of some sort (no doubt also Noah’s
doing), and a lawsuit was threatened but never enacted, and Sandra and Melissa learned not
to trust that process anymore.
But then Melissa took a bite and her mouth was full of tuna salad and she had a moment to
think, This is way too salty I need to cut them both back. She reached across the table to pick
up the jar of salad dressing—on it was a picture of a chubby-cheeked little boy, antique and
blushing and with a cowlick not unlike Noah’s own, he was slurping a spoonful of the dressing,
with the words THE MORE YOU HAVE THE MORE YOU WANT! above him.
That’s when the noise—the sudden resounding BANG!—came from the next room.
Melissa blinked in surprise. This was no door-to-door fundraiser. “Mom?” she called thickly, her
mouth full. No answer. She reached over and got another forkful of tuna, looking at the open
doorway.
Then voices—men’s voices, angry voices, voices crowded and sloppy with rage and stress.
And her mother saying, very clearly from the next room: “What?”
A man’s voice bellowing, “Fuck offa me!”
There was the sound of a scuffle, like two boys wrestling, all slips and steps and grunts and
croaks, coming closer, and then—before Melissa could react—a group of men, three or four of
them but it was a jumble at first, a kinetic blur of form, burst into the living room pushing
Sandra and Noah ahead of them like swimmers tossed in a rough tide.
A low percussive shock rippled across Melissa before she knew why. It took her a white-hot
moment, a skip of nullity like a computer glitch, before she understood that each of the men, in
their dark intentions to come inside the house no matter what, was wearing a cheap Halloween
mask.
No fuckin’ way, her brain told her. A leering clown, a grinning dog, what must have been
intended to be an alien—it was green with big eyes anyway—and a cartoonishly freakish red-
nose, red-cheeked, half-mask which covered only the lower part of the man’s bearded face.
Oddly, frighteningly, it looked like the grotesque blush-cheeked puppets on Mr. Rogers’
Neighborhood, when she was younger those faces were so horrible to watch, and she
remembered having nightmares where they spoke to her in that spooky sniveling mewl Fred
Rogers gave them.
But she was at the table in the kitchen, and the men were in the living room, and it was as
though the air and the sound had been sucked from the room into the vacuum of space.
Abstractly, Melissa thought Is this real, am I having a dream? before she understood indeed it
was real. Two of the men held Noah by the wrists and they struggled, yelling and wrenching
and pummeling him in the living room. Melissa dumbly at the table, fork poised not twenty feet
away, if any of them turned to look they could see her sitting there, but they were busy with
Noah, who verged on becoming violently agitated, and Noah was a very big boy.
About Author Polly Schattel:
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Polly Schattel a writer and filmmaker who has written and directed three award-winning, internationally distributed feature films. Her first novel, “The Occultists,” was published by JournalStone in 2020. She’s taught Film Directing, Screenwriting and Film Editing in the NC University system, New York City and elsewhere. Proudly and passionately transgender, she lives in the mountains of Asheville, NC with her wife and three wild, vicious animals who love people food.
Author links:
– Website
– Facebook
Giveaway
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There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of Shadowdays. 10 winners will each win an ecopy of Shadowdays by Polly Schattel.
For a chance to win, enter the rafflecopter below:
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Thanks so much for visiting fuonlyknew and Good Luck!
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