An undergrad encounters a band of fey rockers during Halloween in Salem MA & falls for a young singer – but is he friend or fey? #PitMad #NA
I am currently seeking representation for my retelling of the ballad, “Tam Lin,” and I am hoping it might interest you. Complete at 70,000 words, OF BLOOD AND ROSES, weaves a strain of song and city magic, illusion and disillusionment and the pains of first love, within the heart of modern-day Salem, Massachusetts.
A disillusioned music major, Maggie Mae Carter is sick of living life timidly, adrift in a sucky sea of collegiate drudgery. The city of Salem has come alive for the Halloween season, but for Maggie, the magic is missing. So when she hears a voice on the radio that makes her feel more alive than she has in years, Maggie steals away to The Hall — a labyrinthine rock club in the heart of “Witch City” — to meet the young man who spins folksongs into rock ‘n’ roll perfection.
After a night that leaves her breathless, Maggie is plunged into the world behind the shadows of The Hall, discovering that there’s more to Thomas Lynn than meets the eye. And when he lets slip that he’s going to be sacrificed by a band of faery folk-rockers on Halloween night, Maggie will risk everything to save the man she loves, even if it means going toe-to-toe with the R&B Queen of Faerie herself.
OF BLOOD AND ROSES
First Page(ish)
My father forbade me to go to The Hall that night.
I listened to him calmly – he was being quite rational, a welcome change – and then I went anyway.
The copper beech beyond the glass shivered in the cool October air, and the glow from the streetlight gathered golden in the leaves. Hoisting open my window, I hiked up my ridiculously impractical (but deliciously scarlet) ’50s-style dress, narrowly avoided strangulation by my purse, and climbed down the tree’s sprawling, silver-barked branches. Climbed is too generous a word for what actually transpired. I slipped on the beech bark, which was smooth as polished stone, and, in an aerial display that I can only hope amused the lone squirrel watching, I landed in my father’s petunias. After retrieving one of my black leather flats from the hedges, where it had flown seemingly of its own volition, I swore to myself that next time, if there was a next time, I would dress more sensibly.
I wasn’t quite bold enough to swipe my father’s keys, which meant that my mode of transportation for the night would be my faithfully rusted mountain bike. I don’t think I have to point out the shame of a twenty-one-year-old stealing away on her fifth-grade bicycle, but it had silver handlebars curved like a bull’s horns, and I felt like a rapscallion when riding it, which was, I thought, worth all the hideousness.
As it turns out, my dress was equally unsuitable for bicycle riding; what the silky material was perfect for was indecent wind-induced exposure, and all I could do was try to keep the flashing to a minimum. Despite my best efforts, by the time I pulled up to The Hall the count was somewhere around twenty-seven. And that’s a conservative number.
I checked my cell phone only to find that my no-good trollop of a friend had flaked out on me with some paltry excuse she hadn’t even bothered to make convincing. Without Kendra, I was sorely tempted to turn my sad little bike around and pedal home.
“Perseverance, woman!” I muttered to no one in particular, thus solving the mystery of why my friend had ditched me.
I needed to get out of the house, and I needed to get away from the pile of homework that awaited me there. I had abandoned my ethnomusicology reading, which took my innate love of music and hurled verbal abuses such as phenomenological theory and romantic hermeneutics at it until I died a little on the inside. It’s not the romantic that I object to – romantic is a good word – it’s that cold, unwieldy mouthful of hermeneutics that makes me want to weep. Where, now, was my love of music? Cowering under my bed somewhere, I’m certain. Tonight, I was hoping to rekindle some of that fire.
I locked up my bicycle, and, looking up at the corroded neon sign that was supposed to read THE HALL (one of the L’s was out), I made for the door.
Past the rough brick facade, The Hall was dark. Past those painted doors, everything was shadow, but shadow in so many shades; the darkness seemed alive and breathing, rippling and viscous-thick, almost like smog. The lights of the stage cut through it in fat beams that blinded, and the air smelled sharply sweet, like cigar smoke mixed with sweat and blood and roses.
Imagine a literary land where Gretel is an anorexic with multiple personality disorder, and Baba Yaga spins in verse. #PitMad #YA/#NA SSCollection
Imagine a literary land where Rumpelstiltskin is an orphaned poet struggling to find her voice; where Hades – a hipster heart-throb, you know, a real artistic type – is seducing all the ladies; where Gretel is an anorexic with multiple personality disorder; and where Little Red Riding Hood is an angsty teenager who discovers a touch of the wolf in herself.
In the vein of retellings by Angela Carter, Emma Donoghue, Anne Sexton, and Francesca Lia Block, How the Night Tastes explores the sexual and psychological landscape of the soul through the lens of fairy tales. Firmly rooted in the present – in the cities and suburbs of modern-day America – familiar characters from fairy tales, myths, and ballads try to find their way through the dark forest of adolescence. With the common theme of transformation weaving through the collection’s narrative, you will live within these stories, dream them, reimagine them, and come through the mirror transformed.
Molly Pinto Madigan 