Blurb:

Alissa's life changed when she found the Codex of the Red Spider disguised as a forgotten book on a dusty shelf in a small suburban thrift store. The knowledge in the codex transcribed straight from the goddess transformed every aspect of her existence and gave her the life she’d always wanted, and the boy she’d always wanted as well.

But on this Halloween, Alissa will learn the goddess she serves is a fickle deity, and there's always a price to pay for her favor.

This coming-of-age short story set during Halloween is a cautionary tale reminding us to be careful what we wish for.

Excerpt:

They hatch adders' eggs and weave the spider's web; He who eats of their eggs dies, and from that which is crushed a snake breaks forth.—Isaiah 59:5

“Hey, Lissa,” Callie Rhodes said as she sidled up to Alissa Novak in the hallway outside their first period English class. “Cute shoes,” she observed as she synchronized her steps to keep pace with the shorter girl. Callie had tried on the exact same pair of shoes at Metroshoe Warehouse, but they hadn’t flattered her long, narrow feet. Callie was a pretty girl, but she had big feet, a flaw her loser little brother was always happy to point out.

“Have you been borrowing my kicks again? “ he’d asked her once in front of Jay-Jay. “They’re all stretched out.”

She’d been mortified. Jay-Jay had thought it was funny. It was a good thing he was so cute, because even her mother thought Jay-Jay was dumb as a box of rocks. Her mother wasn’t one to mince words, at least not when it came to criticizing Callie, but Jay-Jay came from money; and since it was pretty clear Callie wasn’t college material, her mother had set her sights on marrying her off to the highest bidder.

“Face it honey,” her mother had said to Callie the first time a clerk had delivered the bad news that the shoes she’d had her heart set on did not come in a size nine-and-a-half. “You’ll never be a foot model.” Her mother had smirked while making her harsh appraisal, and even the clerk—a bored teenager who was working to buy her first car—was taken aback by her lack of maternal tenderness.

Callie had only been eleven at the time, and she’d been crushed. She hadn’t understood why it made her mother happy that she couldn’t get the cute pink shoes with the sparkly laces she wanted so badly.

Instead, Callie’s mother had bought her a pair of ugly high tops that had stupid daisies on a background of black and white checks. When Callie had objected to the substitution, her mother had slapped her and told her to be grateful she had shoes because some kids didn’t have feet.

Callie had started to cry then because her grandma was missing a foot because she had something called die beesties, and missing feet were gross.

Her mother had felt bad, then, and had taken Callie to get ice cream before they went home—a double-dip of pralines ‘n cream and mint chocolate chip, which were Callie’s favorites. She forgave her mother for slapping her, but she threw the shoes into the back of her closet and refused to wear them unless her mother made a big fucking deal about it, and then she only put them on to make her shut up.

She’d hated those shoes so much that when they disappeared from her locker while she was showering after P.E., she was glad. Until the gym teacher called her mother to tell her that Callie needed her to bring another pair of shoes to school so she wouldn’t be walking around barefoot.

Callie’s mom had shown up with a pair of worn-out flip-flops that probably belonged to their maid. She’d yelled at Callie for being so careless, and Callie had started crying while everyone in the locker room pretended not to notice. After Callie’s mother left, Alissa had offered the other girl half a KitKat in silent sympathy, but Callie had knocked the candy out of her hand and told her to go away.

Callie’s reaction made Alissa glad that she’d stolen the shoes and thrown them into the big dumpster behind the gym. It made her happy to know that Callie’s mom was mean to her, because Callie was so mean to everyone else just because she had naturally curly blonde hair and big blue eyes that sparkled like she was a Disney princess.

Callie was a princess in real life. Alissa had seen pictures of her wearing pretty princess dresses and sparkly crowns she’d won just for being pretty.

Alissa wanted a crown of her own so bad her mother bought her one from a bridal store so she could pretend to be a princess too. Alissa still had the crown, but she’d stopped wearing it when she got old enough to understand that pretending to be a princess didn’t mean that she was one, not a real one like Callie.

Where can readers find Unsanctified?

Available exclusively in A Cursed All Hallows' Eve: Limited Edition Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy, and Reverse Harem Halloween Themed Collection

Grab Your Copy Today!

Available to read FREE in Kindle Unlimited!

books2read.com/cursedallhallowseve

The veil is thin. Darkness calls. Will you answer?

Halloween curses plague the daring heroes and spunky heroines in this spirited collection of tales. A Cursed All Hallows' Eve brings you 20+ stories stuffed with everything from dark gods to brooding shifters, delivering hours of decadent, pleasure-filled reading from bestselling and award winning urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors.

If you can't get enough of those supernatural creatures—vampires, ghosts, witches, demons, and fae—this limited edition collection will alternately thrill you with the spicy and tempt you with the sweet. Delve into these worlds where the living haunt the dead and the undead tempt the breathing.

Answer the call, because this Halloween, not all the costumes are disguises.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Hello and welcome, readers! We have Kat Prarish here with us today. Kat Parrish, thanks for visiting us.

How long have you been a writer and how did you come to writing?

Although I dabbled in writing in high school and college and I’d worked as a reporter and magazine writer, I didn’t publish my first “real” story until 2007. And it came about almost by accident.

I was living in Los Angeles and trying to help my sister navigate the bureaucracy of getting disability and it was just a nightmare. And one really hot day, I’d driven her to the Social Security office, where she waited eight hours to see someone. And I waited with her because I was needed for some of the paperwork. And to keep myself from going insane, I started jotting down story ideas. And by the end of the eight hours, I had a first person, present-tense story I called “Just Another Day in Paradise,”\. I entered the story in an international fiction contest and won second place, which was worth $100 and bragging rights.

And I was hooked after that. “Just Another Day in Paradise” became the title for my first short story collection, which was published under my real name, Katherine Tomlinson.

What really kicked my fiction career into gear was answering a Craigslist ad in 2011 for a micronews site that wanted to start running serial fiction along the lines of Armisted Maupin’s “Tales of the City.” I was hired on a Sunday and my first story was due on the following Wednesday. For the next year, I wrote two stories a week, published every Wednesday and Sunday. I never missed a deadline, and I was juggling multiple storylines and dozens of characters. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. (When I read interviews with people who have workshops like Clarion West bragging about how they wrote two whole stories during their summer, I am somewhat amused. But on the other hand, I applied to Clarion and didn’t make the cut, so maybe it’s just sour grapes.)

Tell us about your title featured in: A Cursed All Hallows’ Eve

“Unsanctified” is a story about magical thinking, wish fulfilment and peer pressure and mental illness. In it an outsider girl transforms herself into one of the “in crowd” at her school after getting her hands on a magical book. Spiders are involved. Many, many spiders.

Stephen King is one of my favorite writers and it’s my homage to him.

How did you come up with the storyline?

I was inspired by the design of a premade cover. (I get a lot of ideas from premade covers and writing stories for those covers justifies the expense!!) The cover was an eerie, very Stephen King-esque photo of a decrepit church in the woods. And I thought “That place looks like it has a lot of spiders.” And then I started free-associating. Spider Woman. Spider Silk. Spider Pig. I love stories about magical books, and I invented one called “The Codex of the Ted Spider,” which my heroine uses as a manual for changing her life.

What inspires you to write?

I love telling stories. I shared a bedroom with my younger sister when we were little and I used to tell her stories to make her go to sleep. (She was a lifelong insomniac.)

I used to participate in a lot of “challenge” short story contests where someone would post a picture and the challenge would be to write a story around the image. I liked that a lot because I’m an amateur photographer (very amateur) and I always see stories in the pictures I take.

And as I said, I love looking at premade covers and stock photos. A picture *is* worth a thousand words and about half of the stories I’ve written were written to fit a cover I’d bought.

But as an ex-reporter, I’m always on the lookout for weird little bits of news that suggest stories. When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, I was fascinated by the stories of skeletal feet washing up on the shores of British Columbia.

I once watched a documentary on what happens to unclaimed bodies in Los Angeles (I don’t have Netflix) and by the time it was over, I had started scribbling down a story that became “In the Kingdom of the Cat,” which is my most anthologized story and still my favorite. I wrote it in an absolute fever, almost like I was taking dictation, and edited it the next day and started sending it out. It’s the one story that makes me cry every time I reread it.

I don’t even have to go looking very far to find inspiration for the dystopian novellas I write. I read Smithsonian Magazine and Live Science every day and come away with more ideas than I could write in a lifetime.

Tell us about your other books:

I’m kind of all over the place with genre and I have a couple of pen names to keep them straight. As Katherine Tomlinson, I write mystery/crime fiction and edit charity anthologies. As Katherine Moore (my maternal grandmother’s name), I write cozy romances and cozy mysteries. Kat Parrish writes urban fantasy, science fiction, PNR, and romantic fantasy. And, as you can see from “Unsanctified,” the occasional horror story.

Probably my best-selling (and definitely my best-reviewed) book is BRIDE OF THE MIDNIGHT KING, a retelling of Cinderella with a vampire twist. I vividly remember having the idea and emailing a friend of mine who’s a USA Bestselling author, and telling her I’d come up with an idea that was either the worst idea ever or…She said write it, and I did, and that became my first novel, although I originally published it as a novella.

I also have a series I call “the Ostrander Witches,” which are contemporary paranormal romance novellas about an extended family of witches living in the Pacific Northwest, here I live. The first, DEUS EX MAGICAL, is probably my favorite, but there’s one sequel out already and more to come!

I mostly write novella length. After so many years of writing short stories, it’s been really hard for me to transition to 40-60,000 word novels. The 10-30K story, though, is right in my wheel-house.

Where can readers find you?

Kat Parrish on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eyeofthekat/

Kat Parrish on Bookbub https://www.bookbub.com/profile/kat-parrish

Kat Parrish on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Kat-Parrish/e/B0133WSZHG%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Eye of the Kat (Kat Parrish/Katherine Tomlinson blog) http://kattomic-energy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html