🌟BOOK BLITZ:🌟 Shantallow by Cara Martin {EXCERPT + GIVEAWAY!}

Shantallow by Cara Martin

Release Date: May 26th 2019

Genres: Horror, Young Adult

Tanvi isn’t the girl of Misha’s dreams; she’s the girl from his nightmares. She has appeared in his chilling dreams before he even meets her; when he DOES meet her, he falls for her.

Their relationship turns stormy, bordering on abusive, and takes a dramatic turn when they are held captive by a group hoping to extract money from Tanvi’s wealthy family.

But there is something more sinister at work, and the kidnappers and their victims find themselves struggling for survival as a supernatural force from Misha’s nightmares makes itself known in the real world.

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{EXCERPT}

When I come to, I’m lying face down on hard plastic, my eyes blinking back gritty tears and blood and stomach pain twisting me into a fetal position. My hands want to fly to my abdomen, to protect it from something that’s already happened, but they can’t. They’re frozen behind my back. I thrash around like a fish out of water, my mouth gone like a horror movie creature — solid flesh where the opening should be.

“Easy,” a male voice tells me. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Maybe he can’t breathe with his nose fucked up like that,” a second guy suggests.

My head flips frenziedly back and forth, my nostrils inhaling clots where oxygen should be and the world sliding away from me while I plummet toward something else.

“Hold still,” one of them growls, yanking the fleshy covering from my mouth. I splutter and cough, then gulp down air. I’ve barely filled my lungs when something smacks my lips. Wriggling and heaving I sit myself up like an old man, breathing raggedly against whatever they’ve used to reseal my mouth — layers of duct tape, probably. I can almost see its silver gleam, and I keep fluttering my eyelashes, fighting off the onslaught of wet, but it’s like driving through a monsoon without windshield wipers. Nearly impossible.

They’ve left a small hole in the center of the tape this time; a fine stream of air seeps in where my lips part. I’m not going to drown in my own blood in the back of a stranger’s van.

Shifting my weight, I accidentally knock against the figure next to me, who nearly topples me with a shove to the shoulder. I regain my balance before I hit the floor, knees forming a tent in front of me and my hands scraping against plastic behind them. My brain’s skipping double dutch, overclocking as my vision finally begins to clear. 

White Kia. Utility van with whited-out rear windows. Men in ski masks.

They kidnapped Tanvi and whoever else was at the Mahajan house, including me. They thought I saw one of their faces. In truth I didn’t see anything, but being in the van is the better case scenario. Better than being left behind. But where are they taking us? The ski mask floating close to me is the first thing to come partially into focus. White skin around the eye and mouth holes. The guy’s gripping something in one of his hands, his posture tense. Tanvi’s furthest away from me, but she’s the one I see next. Sitting cross-legged, hazy brown legs disappearing into volleyball shoes. Hair hanging in her face, partially obscuring the slash of duct tape over her mouth, and her body swaying slightly from the movement of the van. 

I count all the figures inside the vehicle. Two guys in the front seat, one of them at the wheel and the other in the passenger seat, both of them in baseball hats and all-black clothing. Another two are crouching among us in the back of the van, one with white skin under his mask and the other black, each of them cradling a gun. Four abductees total: a young white girl who can’t be much older than ten, Tanvi, me, and a black guy about our age with a grown-out buzz cut whose chin and neck are smeared with red. He must have tried to fight off the kidnappers too. His face is vaguely familiar, and when he stares pointedly back at me his eyes are beaming a message.

AUTHOR BIO:

Cara Martin is the author of several acclaimed novels for young people published under the name C. K. Kelly Martin. Her most recent novel, Stricken, was released in 2017. A graduate of the Film Studies program at York University, Cara has lived in the Greater Toronto Area and Dublin, Ireland. Within the space of 3500 miles she’s worked a collection of quirky jobs at multiple pubs and video stores, an electricity company, a division of the Irish post office, a London toyshop, and an advertising analytics company. She’s also been an image editor for a dot-com startup that didn’t survive the 90s, and a credit note clerk for Canada's largest national distributor of General Merchandise. Cara currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario with her husband and is still afraid of the Child Catcher from the film adaptation of CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG.

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