Rid of Red
Horror, 680 pages, 11/17/2023
Artwork by Miriam Hoffmann
Synopsis
Kira Trecothik doesn’t feel good about letting her teenaged daughter Leigh go to a sleepaway summer camp, but she has to get over that. A mother has to let go, eventually. So Kira lets go, and Leigh goes to camp, and a nightmare scarcely dreamt of comes true: there’s a shooting at the camp. Leigh is killed. Upon learning of her daughter’s death, Kira feels as though her life ends too. Can’t understand how she can keep on living, beyond the end.
Yet she does keep living. And before long, Kira learns that her daughter died a hero; Leigh gave her own life to save three of her friends. This does nothing to make Kira feel better. Until she learns another thing: that the world is a stranger, more terrible place than she’d realized. For there exists an entity, a towering creature that needs nothing, but wants so much. An entity that finds Kira, and offers her a gift: Leigh’s life. It will bring Kira’s daughter back to her.
But it wants something in return, of course. Something simple, yet impossible. It wants Kira to kill the three girls that Leigh had died to save. Only then will it bring Leigh back. Oh, Kira knows she can’t do this. How could she? Yet locked in the endless torment of living beyond the end, it’s not long before she starts to wonder…well, how could she? With less emphasis on the could, and a quite a bit more on the how.
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