From the Publisher
✰"This bold and bloody coming-of-age story is an enthralling page-turner." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Plenty of Parisian details and gracefully outlined dance scenes meld with graphic violence and intense emotions for a deep exploration of what defines and sustains true friendship and self-acceptance...intricate and unsettling." - Booklist
Praise for I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me:
"Gory, gripping, and visceral; examines how supernatural and systemic power unleash the monster within all of us." - Kirkus Reviews
"hile the scares are grisly, Shea skillfully uses them to reveal hard truths surrounding institutions that capitalize on exclusion, and to depict the lengths one teen goes for acceptance and recognition." - Publishers Weekly
"A charged series starter, drenched in gore, that uses horror to interrogate the brutalities of a calcified institution and its impact on real lives. Horror and ballet fans alike will find much to love." - Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-08-17
In this thrilling sequel to 2023’sI Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, a former prima ballerina reckons with the ramifications of her decision to forge a deal with a primordial deity—as well as with her grief, guilt, and the god’s growing demands.
Laure Mesny, the current embodiment of the eldritch Wicked Dark, drinks, parties, and dances to cope with the aftermath of events that killed her best friend and sealed her Mephistophelian pact. She begins to suspect that her alliance with the god Acheron is more parasitic than symbiotic and fears she’s losing what little agency and selfhood she has as he nests within her body. Meanwhile, people are dying violently on the streets of Paris, and the immortal land of Elysium, in “a dimension beyond Paris,” inexorably begins to rot. As brown-skinned Laure investigates, she’s shocked by the secrets she uncovers that threaten both the mortal and immortal worlds. Laure feels grotesque, unloved, and abandoned, saying, “Perhaps I was a monster to be put down, when all I’d ever done was try to survive.” But she’s a fierce and vulnerable antihero, someone who protects herself as well as outcasts and the vulnerable. Beneath the viscera, the story underscores that the real horror isn’t the monsters we become in order to survive a cruel world, but the powers that try to bend and break us to commit atrocities for their benefit.
This bold and bloody coming-of-age story is an enthralling page-turner. (author’s note)(Horror. 14-18)
