Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match,” where we introduce you to authors you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to Present GennaRose Nethercott!
Writes:
To quote my – actual – Tinder profile: “I write books about shape shifters and living houses and parties full of ghosts. I may or may not have a puppet theater stowed in the trunk of my car.”
In short, I’m a fiction writer and folklorist—and all my stories are tied to the strange and the uncanny. I like to take the scraps of old stories and re-stitch them into new ones. Ghosts playing spin the bottle, or chicken legged houses from Slavic mythology hanging out in a Walgreens parking lot—that’s the kind of stuff that tickles me. When it comes to my work, you can bet on the monstrous and miraculous… but here’s the thing: I don’t care about what monster stories say about monsters. I care what monster stories say about people.
My new book, FIFTY BEASTS TO BREAK YOUR HEART, is a collection of short stories in which the supernatural and the dreamy are used to examine various facets of human longing. I like to think of it as turning up the volume knob on how it feels to be a person. For example, when one character finds herself hollowing out parts of her personality to accommodate a bad boyfriend—well, she does so literally. As in, she starts transforming into an actual house for him to live in… Or when another young woman feels that she is languishing, drowning if you will—she actually drowns. Thirty-seven times, in fact.
Once, I was doing a reading at a bookshop, and after I spoke, a guy raised his hand. When I called on him, he said, “Is there like, a metaphor in there?”
Suffice to say—yeah fella. There’s a metaphor in there.
(Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, apparently puppets are not the sexy lure on the apps one might assume. Ah well.)
About:
33 year old, 5’2” Vermonter. Raised as a professional touring child clown (true). Loves peonies, afternoon tea, and drinking cocktails on rooftops. Can offer many eager facts about the worst hot air balloon disasters in French history. Looking for readers who wish to become more accursed, but in kind of a sexy fun sad way.
I’m looking for readers who:
- Enjoy hanging out in cemeteries
- Long for the campfire ghost stories of youth
- Have ever, is currently, or will one day experience unrequited yearning
- Are a fan of Kelly Link, Angela Carter, Ray Bradbury, boygenius or Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Ever said “Bloody Mary” three times into a mirror
- Are more interested in questions than answers
What to expect if we’re compatible:
- Plenty of spooky little guys
- Stories that feel like a dream you forget upon waking—but leave you with a lingering sense of unease
- A bestiary of invented creatures, complete with illustrations
- Staircases that go down forever
- Impossible things that somehow feel entirely familiar
- A glimpse into the mysterious workings of your heart
FIFTY BEASTS TO BREAK YOUR HEART by GennaRose Nethercott
From the author of the breakout novel Thistlefoot: a collection of dark fairytales and fractured folklore exploring how our passions can save us—or go monstrously wrong.
The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognized as the monstrous thing you are.
Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets—and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend—and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts, a vampire and a goat woman, find solace in each other, even as the world’s lack of understanding might bring about its own end.
In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast, and make you beg to have your heart broken.
Fantasy Anthology [Vintage, On Sale: February 6, 2024, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780593314180 / ]
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About GennaRose Nethercott
GennaRose Nethercott’s book THE LUMBERJACK’S DOVE (Ecco/HarperCollins) was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series for 2017. She is also the lyricist behind the narrative song collection MODERN BALLADS, and is a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including BOMB, The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and PANK, and she has been writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, Art Farm Nebraska, and The Vermont Studio Center, among others. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.
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