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100 Unfortunate Days by Penelope Crowe #atozchallenge

The A to Z April Blogging Challenge 2013   is almost coming to an end. Did you enjoy it? I’m co-hosting it on Amlokiblogs, so drop me a comment there if you have something to say about the challenge itself. On this blog, I’ve been featuring mostly indie-published book excerpts for all of April. I love reading, and supporting author-friends, and this is a good way to do both.

Today, for U, I give you an unusual horror novel: 100 Unfortunate Days by Penelope Crowe. According to Penelope, it is “a daily account of the inner thoughts and musings of a woman with a very different and possibly mad point of view.  It is written in diary form, and each day depicts her thoughts—some are dreams, some gripes, some opinions and some rants”.

100 Unfortunate Days by Penelope Crowe

100 Unfortunate Days by Penelope Crowe

Elevator Pitch: Warning: This book might not be for you.

It is dark, creepy, and written like a diary. Not for the faint of heart.

If you stumbled upon the diary of a stranger you might be compelled to read. If you stumbled upon the diary of a madwoman–how could you turn away?

Excerpt:

Day 23

Once there was a little girl. She went into her grandmother’s special cabinet and took out all the scarves. Some were bright pink with gold coins sewn to them, some were square and some were rectangular, one had the bright eyes of many foxes, but all were silk. She knew the scarves were magic, and she brought them outside with a basket of clothes pins. She hung the scarves on the weeping willow tree in the back yard all around the low-hanging outside branches, and formed a beautiful house with windows and a big door that opened and closed.

As she clipped the last pin to the last scarf the house filled with gold furniture, and the fox jumped off the scarf and became her pet. She could hear music in her head and could light fire with her fingertips. She looked up into the night sky and she knew how old the stars were. Her eyes were the clear green of the ocean and she did not have to blink. She knew all the languages of the world, and as she lay on the ground the earth swallowed her. It held her as she slept and in the morning she left her scarf house with the fox and went in to the woods. She took her pocket knife and carved her name in a tree that grew the wood that would someday form her coffin. She cut her hand on the knife and her blood dropped on the ground.

A crow flew down from the sky and landed at her feet near the blood. “Go home,” it said and flew away. She followed a trail of poisonous mushrooms deeper into the woods and fell to her knees at the sight of the moon in the distance. She closed her eyes and went home to her silk house. Her parents missed her very much, and her grandmother was not even mad anymore that she played with her scarves without asking. But she did not know this, and she did not miss them. She cut the lemon tart that was her breakfast and picked raspberries from the bush next to the weeping willow tree. One day she missed her parents and she went home, but they did not know her…she was not a little girl any more.

Day 33

There are days when I can find nothing good in the world and I hate everyone.

Day 34

I may have the ability to kill people or things with my thoughts. I think I’ve done it several times.

Buy the book on Amazon

Are you a horror fan? Would you buy this book?

Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas is the author of You Beneath Your Skin and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and Asia. She has been shortlisted for Best Small Fictions and Bath Novel Awards and is co-editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her literary crime thriller series, the Blue Mumbai, is represented by Lucienne Diver from The Knight Agency. Both The Blue Bar and The Blue Monsoon were published in 2023.

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