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.

In this ingenious and subversive twist on the classic gothic novel, the mysterious past of an island mansion lures two sisters into a spiderweb of scandal, secrets, and murder. Two sisters, strangers since birth yet bound by family secrets, are caught up in a century-old mystery on an isolated island. After arriving on Block Island to find her birth mother, Blake Bronson becomes convinced she’s the heroine of a gothic novel—the kind that allowed her intermittent escape from a traumatic childhood. How else to explain the torrential rain, the salt-worn mansion known as White Hall, and the restless ghost purported to haunt its halls? But before Blake can discern the novel’s ending, she’s found dead, murdered in a claw-foot tub. The proprietress of White Hall stands accused. Summoned by a letter sent from Blake before she died, Thalia Mills returns to the island she swore she’d left for good. She finds that Blake wasn’t the first to die at White Hall under suspicious circumstances. Thalia must uncover the real reason for Blake’s demise before the forces conspiring to keep Block Island’s secrets dead and buried rise up to consume her too.

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.