... or How My Words Will Bring About the End of the World
by
Ronald Malfi
My wife is terrified. She’s got a theory
and it may be right. I’ve been ignoring it for some time, but now...well, now
it’s getting harder and harder to look the other way. And the
children...they’re watching us.
Let
me back up...
Even
before I’d met my wife, it had been going on. My high school friends—those who
read my stories, my manuscripts—commented on the peculiarity of them, the
serendipitous and eerily prophetic nature of some of my stories. At around
thirteen years old, I wrote a story about a thunderstorm that brought dead
things back to life. I printed it out and handed it off to one of my best
friends who took it home that night and read it...until the power went out in
his house due to a raging thunderstorm. The next morning, a dead squirrel had
been washed up on his front porch. It wasn’t the zombified version that
appeared in my story, but it was close enough to cause him some consternation.
Sometime
later, I wrote a story about a group of friends who fight a monster, and at the
end of the story, one of the characters, who was based on one of my best
friends, moves to California. About a year later, that friend’s family indeed
picked up and moved. To California. The remaining friends, who thought I had
conspired with my typewriter to make this happen, blamed me for a while.
Soon
afterward, I wrote what, at the time (I was still a high-schooler), I
considered my epic story. At 500 pages, I had written a manuscript called The
House in the Woods, and had used all my friends as characters in it. (Many,
many years later, a very different version of this original manuscript would be
published as what I currently consider my epic novel, December Park.)
There is a scene in the original manuscript where the boys tromp through the
woods surrounding their town and come across the burnt-out hull of a 1957
Chevy. A very random scene. The woods were a real place in the town where I
grew up, and we frequently ventured into them, but of course we never found the
cannibalized corpse of an old car...until after I’d written that scene. But
then there it was, written into existence, an old Chevy in the woods, just as I
had written it. (It was too decayed to tell if it was exactly a 1957, but it
was close enough for government work.)
Things
only got worse from there.
Once
I got married, settled into real life, and began publishing on a regular basis,
the prophetic nature of my fiction only seemed to increase. I wrote a novel
called Passenger, which included a fairly gratuitous dog-fight scene,
something I knew existed but was rarely if ever talked about on the news. Soon
after, Michael Vick was on all the TV channels. After that, I wrote a novel
called Snow, and although here in Maryland our winters are generally
mild, we were unapologetically crushed by a terrible snowstorm later that year.
“Cut
it out,” my wife told me. “I know you’re doing it. And I hate the cold.”
She
knew of my friends’ claims that what I wrote about back in high school came
true, and I thought maybe she was starting to believe it. As for me, I just
attributed it to coincidence, like how, back in the 1980s, all those
switching-bodies movies came out at the same time. Coincidence, right?
My
wife was pregnant with our first child while I was writing Cradle Lake, which
focuses on a couple who have suffered a series of miscarriages. Our daughter
was born without a problem, but it wasn’t until the book was published and my
wife got pregnant a second time that the doctors alerted us to all the possible
“problems” we might face this second time around. Of course, my wife and I were
upset. “It’s your book,” said my wife. “It’s happening again. Please stop.”
Thankfully,
the pregnancy scare turned out okay and our second daughter was born happy and
healthy, which is much better than how the Hammerstuns of Cradle Lake turned
out, but it was still too close for comfort.
Which
brings us up to date. Perhaps it’s hypersensitivity on my wife’s part or perhaps
I’ve surrendered to the superstition and finally bought into it, but with the
looming publication date of Little Girls, my wife and I have found that
our own little girls have been acting...well, strangely. They have begun
waking up in the middle of the night and walking about the house, as if in
search of something. Twice, I’ve opened my eyes to find my four-year-old
daughter staring down at me in bed. She seems to intuit when the mailman will
come, and stands by the door mere minutes before the arrival of the little
white truck. And my one-year-old daughter has been mumbling a phrase that
sounds disconcertingly like, “kill Daddy.”
“It’s
happening again,” says my wife. “Your book...”
I
try not to think about it too much, even when my daughter starts humming a song
in the car, and when I turn on the radio, that song is playing. Or how
she seems to know of distant relatives whom she’s never met that have died, and
how she claims my wife and I will be seeing them soon...
These
anecdotes are frightening enough, but I feel I must apologize to the public at
large. Not for Little Girls, which I think is a perfectly fine book, and
not for my little girls who, most of the time, are also perfectly fine,
but for next year’s release—a book titled The Night Parade. Which, dear
readers, I’m sorry to report, is about the end of the world.
Nice
knowing you.
From Bram Stoker Award nominee Ronald Malfi comes a brilliantly chilling novel of childhood revisited, memories resurrected, and fears reborn…
When Laurie was a little girl, she was forbidden to enter the room at the top of the stairs. It was one of many rules imposed by her cold, distant father. Now, in a final act of desperation, her father has exorcised his demons. But when Laurie returns to claim the estate with her husband and ten-year-old daughter, it’s as if the past refuses to die. She feels it lurking in the broken moldings, sees it staring from an empty picture frame, and hears it laughing in the moldy greenhouse deep in the woods…
At first, Laurie thinks she’s imagining things. But when she meets her daughter’s new playmate, Abigail, she can’t help but notice her uncanny resemblance to another little girl who used to live next door. Who died next door. With each passing day, Laurie’s uneasiness grows stronger, her thoughts more disturbing. Like her father, is she slowly losing her mind? Or is something truly unspeakable happening to those sweet little girls?
Praise for Ronald Malfi and his novels:
“One cannot help but think of writers like Peter Straub and Stephen King.”
—FearNet
"Malfi is a skillful storyteller."—New York Journal of Books
"A complex and chilling tale….terrifying."—Robert McCammon
"Malfi’s lyrical prose creates an atmosphere of eerie claustrophobia…haunting."—Publishers Weekly
"A thrilling, edge-of-your-seat ride that should not be missed."—Suspense Magazine
Links to Pre-Order or Purchase:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
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Or pick up or ask to order at your local independent bookstore or anywhere e-formats are sold!
Ronald Malfi
Ronald Malfi is an award-winning author of many novels and novellas in the horror, mystery, and thriller categories from various publishers, including Little Girls, this summer’s 2015 release from Kensington.
In 2009, his crime drama, Shamrock Alley, won a Silver IPPY Award. In 2011, his ghost story/mystery novel, Floating Staircase, was a finalist for the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for best novel, a Gold IPPY Award for best horror novel, and the Vincent Preis International Horror Award. His novel Cradle Lake garnered him the Benjamin Franklin Independent Book Award (silver) in 2014. December Park, his epic childhood story, won the Beverly Hills International Book Award for suspense in 2015.
Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977, and eventually relocated to the Chesapeake Bay area, where he currently resides with his wife and two children.
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