The Monstrous Kind - Softcover

Gregovic, Lydia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593902661 ISBN 13: 9780593902660

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Fans of Erin A. Craig and Dana Schwartz will love this atmospheric, haunting, romantasy inspired by Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility about sisters vying to hold on to their manor, set in a Regency England with monsters prowling at its perimeters.

Merrick Darling's life as the daughter of the Manor Lord of Sussex is better than most. Unlike the commoners, she is immune to the fog that encroached on England generations earlier. She will never become a phantom--one of the monstrous creatures that stalk her province’s borders; and as long as the fires burn to hold them back, her safety is assured. She wants for nothing, and yet she will never inherit her family's manor. She must marry smartly or live at her sister, Essie's, kindness. 


Everything is turned on its head, though, when Merrick's father dies, suddenly. Merrick must return home and what she discovers at Norland Manor is bewildering. Once strong and capable, Essie is withdrawn and frightened—and for good cause. A recent string of attacks along her province’s borders have turned their once bucolic countryside into a terrifying and unpredictable landscape. The fog is encroaching and the fires aren’t holding, which makes Merrick and Essie vulnerable in more ways than one. Failure to protect one’s province could lead to them losing everything.

Merrick knows she can't reveal their current state to the rest of England, but when her sister goes missing it's clear she needs help. Only who can she trust when everyone seems to be scheming for something. And when all she holds to be true feels like its slipping right out of her grasp.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lydia Gregovic is a Brooklyn-based author and editor, whose identity is rooted in the Texas gulf and along the coastline of Montenegro. She currently lives in New York with her complete collection of the works of Jane Austen and several half-dead plants. The Monstrous Kind is her first novel.

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Chapter One

In the end, it is death that calls me home again.

I rest my forehead against the cool glass of the carriage window, attempting to lose myself in the crisp evening chill of it on my skin, its smoothness like an unbroken crust of ice atop a pond. When I fled Norland House last May, spring was unfurling; now the beginnings of autumn have perfumed the air with decay. Somewhere beneath the wheels of my vehicle, worms slide through the summer-dark earth, waiting for nature to shed its past season like a snakeskin for them to feast on.

The route I’m traveling should be familiar to me. After all, it is the same path I took when I left home--only the direction is different, heading toward our province rather than away from it. Yet gazing through the window at the stretch of rugged landscape beyond, the scenery seems utterly foreign to my eyes, any recollection of it tossed forcibly from my mind months prior like a glove I’d outgrown.

What was there to remember? Up until a week ago, I’d believed I was never coming back.

Merrick--Papa is gone. If you’ve no more pressing social obligations, I urge you to return to Sussex at once.

My sister’s words have burned themselves onto the backs of my eyelids like a brand, searing me anew every time I blink.

Even before I’d read the letter, I’d been suspicious when the Eaveses’ footman handed me a letter bearing the Darling seal--my Manor’s seal--on it at breakfast two mornings ago. I hadn’t heard from my sister since my hasty departure from Norland House just over four months past. My leaving was the second blow to our proud family tree in a little over a fortnight: three weeks prior to it, the beloved Lady Artemis Darling’s coach had been found overturned at the edge of the Graylands, what was left of her remains a few yards beyond her vessel, cast aside like a napkin tossed from the table. The tragedy quickly consumed our province, though it was not, exactly, unexpected. Even in a place as well-guarded as Sussex, we all knew the risks of traveling so close to the border. Knew what dwelled on the other side of the fiery lamps, hidden in the mists--had seen the bones of the victims they left behind, shards of ivory picked clean, pure and white as sacrificial lambs.

At the thought of my family, guilt presses at my chest, a balled fist against my sternum. After Mama’s death, I should have stayed with my sister and my father. I should have mourned. Instead, I remained by their side for less than a month before running as fast and as far as I could like a rabbit sprinting from its burrow.

Do not leave me here alone. My sister’s voice is a whisper in my mind, her plea one that has trailed behind me like a heavy train with each mile I’ve traveled, threaded its way through every crowd at all the gilded parties I’ve attended while in New London. Even before Mama’s death, Essie and I had been drifting apart for some time--as we aged, it became harder and harder to deny that beyond any blood ties, we were chiefly one another’s competition--but still, the distance between us hadn’t lessened the sting I felt when I’d denied her. She’d asked me for help that day, and I’d abandoned her without any, without so much as a backward glance before I had the maids whisk the rest of my luggage out the door.

The truth was, I left because I couldn’t stand to be in the same province with her, much less the same house. Not when the memory of what my father had told me was angled like a knife to my neck, hindering my every breath.

A shiver runs down my spine as from his bench up front, the driver guides the horses around a bend, bringing Sussex’s coastline fully into view. Bathed in the vicious tangerine glow of the sunset, jagged seaside cliffs gnash limestone fangs at the darkening sky, while from far below I can hear the hushed crash of frothing waves lapping at the pebbled strip of shore like dogs begging for scraps. A line of iron lampposts extends along the cliff edge for as far as I can see in either direction, fires burning steadily in the lanterns that hang from each of their boughs, blazing against the approaching night.

Beyond that lies the fog.

It has long since swallowed the beach whole, twining, ivylike, up the cliffside before cresting over its top like ocean spray. Banks of mist the color of dripping candle wax fill my vision, undulating gently just outside the fire’s reach like a nest of eels. Where the weak evening sun hits it, the fog gleams with a metallic gray sheen, like coins catching the light.

The Graylands. That’s what we call them--the mist-choked, uninhabitable swaths of our nation, the Smoke, contained only by legions of fiery border lamps like the ones in front of me. My ancestors erected the first of the barriers almost two centuries ago, and in the years since they’ve become our primary line of defense in our fight against the fog that otherwise would seep onto our land like pus from a wound.

That would bring its monsters with it.

Unease settles over me like a coat of damp morning dew. When I was a girl, the Graylands only licked the base of the cliffs in this area. Now, despite my family’s best efforts, the mist lurks a couple meters away from the road, hovering in the corner of my eye like an unwelcome guest. A few more years--a few more breaches--and we’ll likely have to remap this route entirely.

I force my thoughts away from the subject. Those of us born in the centuries after the fog’s arrival have grown used to living like holidaymakers at low tide. We eat and drink, we even laugh on occasion, but we know that regardless of any defenses we raise, one day the water will come and sweep us all away.

Just as it swept away my parents, I think. Frustratingly, the obituary the papers ran about Father’s passing was as scarce on details as my sister’s letter had been. But as Manor Lord of Sussex, Silas Darling had more contact with the Graylands than most in our land. Part of our sacred bargain, is how Father always described it to me--the hundreds-of-years-old pact made between my ancestors, the original twelve Manor Lords, and those they governed. Manorborn, like my family, use the immunity we’ve been gifted against the mist’s transformative touch to protect our respective provinces: repairing damaged border lamps, overseeing patrols, and, when necessary, slaying the beasts that slip through the cracks in our armor. In return, a portion of each province’s income is reserved for the ruling Manor. It is a system that has been honed through the turning of the generations, a birthright that passes from Manorborn to Manorborn like a lit torch--unfaltering, unfailing.

I remember the first time I followed my father into the fog. I was thirteen, barely past my first blood, when it happened: a Phantom spotted along the cliffy southern ridge of Sussex, apparently having evaded our patrols. Father and I tracked it together, following it along the seaside before plunging after it into the Graylands, snaring the creature just as it tried to escape into the milky obscurity of its home. I can still see it--the way the mist parted in plumes around my father’s back as he rode like enormous feathered wings. As if he were some divine warrior sent from the heavens, untouchable to us mere mortals.

Yet looking at the mist now, I can’t help but wonder if it has inched closer in the time I’ve been away. Whether one of the creatures Father hunted finally bit him back.

Leaning against my seat, I fish in my handbag for a distraction--and am rewarded when my fingers brush the pulpy skin of a folded newsprint. Carefully, I pull the paper out and flatten it in my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593902661
• ISBN 13: 9780593902660
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland