QSFer Lilith Frost has a new lesbian horror book out: Pastel Gothic.
Misty Blake is a first-generation college student from rural Alabama…and this is her diary.
Upon arrival at the University of Montevallo, she’s greeted by the quaint, small-town charm, including the historic, pastel colored Jeffcoat house situated at the edge of town. But the picturesque setting soon becomes the landscape for something darker as Misty spirals into emotional and psychological turmoil.
On her own for the first time, Misty must navigate school and new relationships, including her burgeoning queer identity, in a place where a beautiful veneer can be hiding something gruesome. A dead pig in an overgrown garden. A missing person. Is it all in her head or could something supernatural be afoot?
This thrilling Southern Gothic from the author of the Hard Way Home series is told through the diary entries of a sarcastic and witty narrator, creating a page-turner full of dark humor, early 2000s nostalgia, and lush depictions of a natural world that doesn’t always seem to follow the laws of nature.
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Excerpt
My main goal is to not let the fear that I inherited a failure gene overcome my staunch determination to do what I set out to do. I came here to study English.
Why English? Good question, Diary.
Because my next goal is law school and you can have a bachelor’s degree in literally anything and then get into law school. They recommend something that’ll give you a leg up—political science, history, or social work. But you can get a degree in cake baking (seriously, they have home ec as a major at this school) and as long as your grades are good, your LSAT scores are decent, and you don’t aim for a law school that’s out of your league, you can get in. I picked English because I love to read. I love to write, evidenced by my prolific diary keeping over the years. I love to write about what I read and go read about how to write about that. I can do it all fucking day and I’m about to.
I’ll be a lawyer like on Law & Order. I’ll wear suits and carry things around. People will respect me and no one will know I come from an Autauga County backwater. I’ll get rid of my accent and go north. Not to New York City like on TV, but somewhere with a medium pace. What’s a medium-pace city? St. Paul? Baltimore? I’ll figure it out and go there.
My goal is to get the hell out of here and never look back. But I don’t just want to get away from the swamp I crawled out of; I want to fly so high that I can never be dragged back down into it. I want to be the great blue heron, a totally different species from the family of deer flies I came from. I want to get to the point where we have nothing to do with each other and I can’t ever be reduced to their level again.
I drove into Montevallo today and I tried to take in the landscape more. When you do a day trip to campus (which I did for transfer student orientation) you just don’t really absorb the environs. You’re excited, amped, hopeful; There’s a rosy glow about the whole scene.
As I was getting in today, haphazardly hunting down my new apartment through MapQuest directions, I realized that Montevallo is just a big, rouged-up cow pasture. I came up off I-65 North through Calera where I was greeted by vacant fields, railroad-side trailer parks, and a massive lime plant that was spewing smoke. The plant has bleached the entire road in front of it, along with the grass and trees on the road opposite it. I don’t think I came this way before because I did not see that! I’m sure the tap water out here is gonna be A-plus.
I drove through what’s called downtown, the area with the university and all the little shops and stores. Three stoplights later, I was on the opposite end of the pasture in a new place. It felt like I was driving smack out of the city of Montevallo, but I couldn’t have been since the address the landlady had given me for my change-of-address form had Montevallo listed as the city. I guess it’s located outside of the downtown area.
The roads were empty enough I was able to slow to about five miles-an-hour and multitask keeping the car straight and finding the next turn on my MapQuest paper. It kept recommending a left turn onto a gravel road that led to nowhere but (get ready for this shocker) a big, vacant field. I sat in the field and pulled out my phone, my untrusty Motorola V120, and tried to call the landlady for directions. Come to find out (once again, no shock) I had negative bars. Usually when my phone can’t get the 2G it was advertised to be able to get, it’ll connect to radio towers. It wasn’t even doing that. I lamented to no one that the whole point of having a cell phone was for situations like this, but that’s also exactly when it won’t work.
I drove back to the downtown area and pulled myself out of my sweaty ass car at a coffee shop with a wraparound porch called Eclipse. I knew it had to be expensive in there since it had an intricately hand-carved, wooden sign out front depicting said eclipse. But sitting in the air conditioning is free. Plus, if my phone still didn’t want to do what it was made for, I could maybe get them to let me use their landline real quick.
A guy with black-rimmed glasses, a five o’clock shadow, and some kind of hippie shirt under his apron greeted me. He seemed to beckon me to the counter.
Diary, I am not a people pleaser. Whatever the opposite is, I am that. Especially when it comes to the unfairer sex.
I perceived that he was being a little flirtatious by waving a pair of tongs between his index and middle finger, smiling, and making the kind of eye contact that made me want to pretend to be blind.
A thin, pale girl with tortoise shell-rimmed glasses and a messy bun came out and put her apron on. A middle-aged woman also popped out from wherever, and their sudden presence made Tongs straighten up his behavior.
I’m not deluded. I’m no prize. I was dripping sweat since the AC in my car is busted. As if to announce my dirt-poverty, I was wearing Mudd jeans and a peasant top from the thrift store. I’m almost as pale as Messy Bun (she had to be anemic) so the heat had brought a lot of color to my face. And to top that off, I rolled up into the Eclipse parking lot in an ‘89 Pontiac Grand Am the color of… Okay, you know how people describe certain shades as “shit green”? There should be a shit blue because that’s what color my car is.
Author Bio
Science fiction/fantasy author who lives in the Deep South.
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