Excerpt from SNAKE-EATER by t. kingfisher Text copyright © 2025 by t. kingfisher, Published by 47north
short Excerpt (Ch 1):
She came around the corner, and there was the house, tucked up in scruffy green shrubs. An impressively multiarmed saguaro grew directly across the road, and an impressively dead one lay slumped beside it. Another low stone wall, like the one at Grandma Billy’s, ran along the road here, then curved around both sides of the house, though this one was devoid of peacocks.
It was a small house. Well, the postmistress said it would be.
It might be two rooms, possibly three. Certainly no more than that. It was tea-colored adobe with two windows in the front, and a wraparound porch that sagged in the middle. Some aggressive vine had eaten two of the porch posts and was making threatening gestures toward a third. There was a rocking chair on the porch that had been cobwebbed into place and glazed in pale-white dust. Solar panels covered the roof, none of them new.
There was a dirt path up to the house. White stones like blocky skulls picked out the edges of . . . well, you couldn’t call them flower beds. Scrub beds, maybe. Whatever the difference was between bare dirt and dirt with gray-green spiky things in it.
This is it. This is where Aunt Amelia lived, until a year ago.
A year ago. A year ago. A year too late.
She set that thought aside, for all the good it did her.
Once upon a time, Selena would have gone up to the house, walked around it, looking in the windows.
Once upon a time, she could talk without worrying about it, and didn’t run every sentence through her head a dozen times first. Once upon a time had come and gone and there were no happily ever afters. She let go of her suitcase, untangled Copper’s leash, and put her hand on the stone wall.
It was hard under her fingers, the stones rough, the edges sharp. She closed her eyes. She could believe that the peacock and Grandma Billy were part of a dream, but the stone wall was too clearly a real thing. If the wall was real, then everything else was real. All right. Not a dream, then. It was all really happening and her aunt was really dead and she was really broke and stranded in a town called Quartz Creek and the dead woman’s house was really in front of her.
It looked . . . friendly.
If the two windows were eyes, then the left one was half closed into a wink by the rioting vine. The porch sagged into a smile. The desert was enormous and the house was very small, but it looked brave and rather hopeful.
It reminded her of Copper when she was a puppy, deeply convinced that the world was full of kind giants who loved her, and if she only waited long enough, one would come and play.
I am losing my mind. I mean, I already lost it, I know, but now I am getting maudlin and reading things into a falling-down porch. It’s probably heatstroke. I should sit down.
If I go up to the house, I could sit down on the porch. I could even open up the door and go inside. It might be cooler in there.
Selena stood by the wall and didn’t move.
It was a nice house. She could see why her aunt might have lived there. But it wasn’t hers.
If I go in, I might start to like it and if I do, somebody will take it away from me. You can’t just walk up and lay claim to a house. That’s not how it works.
She remembered the empty houses in the middle of town, with the boarded-up windows. The postmistress told me—she said they can’t keep people in them—but it can’t be like that, not really . . .
It was too easy, too unearned. You did not get things handed to you. It was a central tenet of Selena’s mother’s philosophy, that you did not just get things handed to you. Everything had to be earned.
SNAKE-EATER by T. Kingfisher
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author T. Kingfisher comes an enthralling contemporary fantasy seeped in horror about a woman trying to escape her past by moving to the remote US desert—only to find herself beholden to the wrath of a vengeful god.
With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. The scorpions and spiders are better than what she left behind.
Because in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks beneath the surface. Like the desert gods and spirits lingering outside Selena’s house at night, keeping watch. Mostly benevolent, says her neighbor Grandma Billy. That doesn’t ease the prickly sense that one of them watches too closely and wants something from Selena she can’t begin to imagine. And when Selena’s search for answers leads her to journal entries that her aunt left behind, she discovers a sinister truth about her new home: It’s the haunting grounds of an ancient god known simply as “Snake-Eater,” who her late aunt made a promise to that remains unfulfilled.
Snake-Eater has taken a liking to Selena, an obsession of sorts that turns sinister. And now that Selena is the new owner of his home, he’s hell-bent on collecting everything he’s owed.
Fantasy Dark | Paranormal [ 47North, On Sale: December 1, 2025, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781662525094 / eISBN: 9781662525100 ]
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About T. Kingfisher
T. Kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen-name of Ursula Vernon, an author from North Carolina. In another life, she writes children’s books and weird comics. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy and the Eisner, and has won the Hugo, Sequoyah, Nebula, Alfie, WSFA, Coyotl and Ursa Major awards, as well as a half-dozen Junior Library Guild selections.
This is the name she uses when writing things for grown-ups. Her work includes multiple fairy-tale retellings and odd little stories about elves and goblins.
When she is not writing, she is probably out in the garden, trying to make eye contact with butterflies.
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