Month9Books Halloween Spooktacular and a Giveaway!
Hello and Happy Halloween Everyone! We here at Month9Books love Halloween so we decided to share some of our favorite Halloween things whether it be pics of us or our animals in costumes, our favorite Halloween moments, or even why we wrote scary books! Make sure to check in ever day this week for a feature and a giveaway!
Today we feature Vicki Weavil and Heather Reid!
The Wraiths – The Ghosts Haunting CROWN OF ICE by Vicki L. Weavil
It might seem that CROWN OF ICE—my dark YA retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”—is story more suited for winter and the Christmas holiday season than Halloween. But ghosts are actually a major aspect of CROWN OF ICE. The wraiths, who are the mindless, bodiless spirits of former Snow Queens, haunt the icy corridors of the current Snow Queen’s palace.
My protagonist, Thyra Winther, has lived with the wraiths for years, ever since the wizard Mael Voss brought her to the ice palace and transformed her into the Snow Queen. She’s seventeen, and knows if she can’t complete the reconstruction of a shattered enchanted mirror by her eighteenth birthday, she’ll end up just like the wraiths. This is truly a fate worse than death for Thyra, who values her brilliant mind above all things.
At the beginning of CROWN OF ICE, Thyra describes the wraiths and their fate:
At night the palace’s crystal halls are tinged sapphire. One of the first bits of magic that Voss taught me was to set the carved walls alight so that I’m not forced to walk the halls in darkness. I conjure a cold light that glows within the thick walls without melting the ice. I mastered this trick quickly once I knew what those shadows held. If I leave an area in darkness, they come—the girls who reigned as Snow Queen before me.
“I must find it.” Their hollow words wind about me like a shroud. “The last piece. I must place it. Give it to me.”
They are only shadows—swirling mists that occasionally coalesce to create phantoms of their former selves. So many girls, from so many eras. Some from the far past, their ghostly bodies attired in ancient robes and strange, peaked headdresses, and some dressed in the garb of more recent years. I know there is nothing left of their real natures—a curse has destroyed their minds. All thought is lost to them, except for the memory of their final terror. Of every shape and size and time, they share only one trait—the absolute agony that burns within their hollow eyes.
They suffer a fate that makes ordinary death look like a blessing—the loss of so much more than a body. It is the sacrifice of the soul and the destruction of mind and will.
I would free them if I could. Allow them the respite of a true death. Send them to their rest. But it does not matter what I might desire to give them, I cannot alter their plight. They thrust their hands at me, but their fingers can neither hold nor grasp. They are not dead, they cannot die. Mael Voss made them immortal when he made them queen.
Many of Thyra’s actions are driven by her burning desire to escape this terrible fate. She is haunted by the consequences of failure, which she can see and experience only too well:
I often encounter them in the shadows, their translucent faces frozen into masks of grief, their eyes devoid of memory, of sense. I stride past them. Or through them, if necessary. A disgusting sensation, like walking through a spider’s web—light as milkweed floss but clinging to my skin. Still, I’d rather endure such unpleasantness than stay in their company, haunted by a constant reminder of my fate.
“The final piece,” they whine. “I have it. I hold it. I will place it correctly. I will remain queen.”
They cannot truly speak with me—their words are those burned upon their tongues when their lives were ripped into shreds of mist. Only when they warn of my future, channeling the power of the mirror’s curse, do they speak anything other than their foolish, repeated phrases.
“You’ll do nothing.” I snap at them. “You are smoke and air and unending stupidity.”
It does no good for me to show any kindness. They comprehend nothing. Their gaze is turned inward, focused on their own memories of horror.
I stalk away to the safety of my bedchamber, where a cold flame fills the icy fireplace and the skins of slaughtered beasts cover the walls and floor.
They all failed, all those who came before me. But I will conquer Voss’s task. I am no ordinary girl—nothing like the wraiths, although they were once a bit like me. I am brighter than the borealis, sharper than an ice crystal, stronger than the northern winds. I will reassemble the mirror and reign as Snow Queen forever.
The wraiths are a constant horror woven throughout the story, haunting Thyra with the threat of future terror. These ghosts are a major force in the book, so reading CROWN OF ICE for Halloween is perfectly appropriate!
Goodreads| Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Chapters Indigo! | TBD | iBooks
Bringing Shadows Into the Light By Heather L Reid
I don’t remember when they started—the dreams of faceless entities, of black figures standing by my bed whispering in the deep shadows of my childhood room. Sometimes I would wake from their dark grasp and find my six-year-old self standing at the end of my parent’s bed, or in the kitchen, or walking down the hallway. Other times I would suffer from sleep paralysis, trapped between dream and reality, a scream trapped in my throat.
Some nights, fear gripped me so tight I thought my lungs were being crushed under the weight of it. Books kept me company, kept me awake, kept me from falling into the arms of the monsters waiting for me on the other side of sleep as I huddled under the covers with a flashlight, stuffed animals standing guard around my bed. The darkness both terrified and fascinated me and as I grew, I found myself drawn to all the shadowy terror my dreams were made of.
Childhood stories were replaced with novels by Christopher Pike, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Lois Duncan, and V.C.Andrews. Soon, I started writing scary tales of my own— first with short stories and dark poetry and then the novel that would become my debut, Pretty Dark Nothing.
By age twelve, All Hallows’ Eve had become my favorite holiday. A time to become my own monster—a vampire, a witch, and howl at the moon to ward off roaming ghosts like the ancient Celts on which our modern Halloween is said to originate.
Horror movies played on the television the entire month of October, and the sound of Freddy Kruger’s knives scraping across the metal boiler brought a smile to my face and a tingle down my spine.
I looked forward to the change of the leaves from green to golden brown, longer nights, crisp autumn air and the promise of candy and scares. In lieu of my December birthday bash, friends were invited to my annual Halloween party. No gifts were expected, but costumes were mandatory. So were spooky sound effects, gravestones on the lawn, and a trip through my cheesy, low-budget haunted house. Looking back, celebrating Halloween helped me take control of my fear and turn it into something magical.
The more I shined a light on my darkness, the quicker the nightmares faded. I still don’t understand what caused them or what they meant, but one day they no longer held power over me. The fear may be gone, but the shadows of those nightmares have never truly left me. I guess it’s not surprising that those experiences, so vividly etched upon my imagination and tightly twined around my soul, would find their way into my own writing.
In the Pretty Dark series, I wanted to write about a girl facing her own darkness. What would happen if her nightmares manifested in her reality and she was the only one who could see them? How would fear, the self-awareness that what she was seeing might be real but shouldn’t be, affect her everyday life, her relationships, her ability to trust herself, to trust others, and to make decisions.
I chose demons as metaphors for the darkness that lives inside all of us, the personification of that still small voice inside that perpetuates negative thought and twists the truth. They feed on the darkness living inside humans and exploit and magnify the insecurities and self-doubt they find and use it to gain power and create chaos. While I’ve never seen a live demon, I hope my night terrors have been put to good use, to create stories rich in creepy atmosphere and emotional brokenness. I admit that at times it’s been terrifying to conjure up old nightmares and pick at the scars of fear left on my psyche, to bleed some of my own darkness onto the page, but watching Quinn fight demons helped me remember to always be wary of my own.
BAM | Chapters | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | TBD | iBooks | Google Play
1 winner will win an eBook pack of all the authors featured in the spooktacular! International.
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