Possession
Song & Shadow #1
Annie Oldham
YA Paranormal
October 31, 2014
Constance Jerome wants nothing more than to make it through her senior year of high school without being noticed. But when her mother drops the world's biggest bombshell, flying under the radar just isn't in the cards. It turns out Constance is a necromancer—one of the few who can travel the realms of the dead.
Apparently it runs in the family. And now there's a threat coming: another necromancer with plans to disturb the living and the dead, and Constance and her mother are the only ones who can stop him. If only they knew who he was. Or what exactly he was up to. A quiet senior year isn't an option, and Constance must race to stop a high school apocalypse before the balance between the living and the dead is overturned.
Guest Post by Annie Oldham
Reliving High School
I don't know about you, but I had a great high school
experience (and to those of you still in high school, I hope it's treating you
right). I wasn't the most popular girl in school, but I found my niche and had
a good group of friends, and we lived it happily.
Posession has been my first contemporary young adult
novel, and so the theater of high school definitely needed to feature in, but I
didn't want it to be the entire focus of the story—after all, most high
schoolers have lives outside of school. It was this juxtaposition of life at
high school and what goes on outside it and how the two worlds collide that
made writing Possession a lot of fun for me.
The typical high school requirements are there—the jocks,
the mean girls, the wall flowers. But there are also the nice kids. Then there
are the social classes that indelibly exist no matter which high school you
visit. Mixing that with a heavy dose of the paranormal—paranormal that isn't
taken for granted across the board; only a select few are in on the secret, but
everyone is affected—was fun. I know for a lot of people, high school seemed
just a little surreal, maybe just a little paranormal, and so literally adding
the paranormal worked in an extra layer to the high school story.
Constance is one of those girls that just wants to be left
alone and graduate in peace so she can really start her life. But she finds out
she's a necromancer—she can travel the realms of the dead—and suddenly her life
is turned upside down as she tries to navigate the murky waters of high school
and this creepy new power. I love putting characters in unexpected situations.
Constance is the last person you'd expect to take something like this on, but
watching her embrace it is great, as is watching people both rally around her
and regard her as something suspicious or dangerous.
That's what high school—and real life for that matter—is
like. We have choices every day about what goes on around us and whether we'll
rise to what's been given us or if we'll founder beneath it. Fiction can help
us make sense of that, and it can sure be entertaining along the way.
Excerpt
And she needed to know.
She needed to know if what
her mother was saying was true—if Biscuit and the duckling were just those
flukes that sometimes happen because life is unpredictable, or if there was
something more to their existence. Constance
needed proof, and if she had done it once—and it wasn’t a fluke—then she should
be able to do it again.
Her spade struck the box,
and she used her fingers to edge around the lid and pry it off. She sat back on
her heels. Maggots were crawling over the bird’s feathers.
She reminded herself that
she needed to know.
How did she even start?
What had she done with the duckling years ago? She forced herself to look at
the tiny body and the spindly legs, and tried to ignore the white worms
destroying the small form. She had felt so sad for that duckling, had wanted to
return it to its family. But what had she actually done? Her hands hovered over
the shoebox. She couldn’t bring herself to actually touch it, but as her hand
lingered, the shadows made a film around the edges of her vision. She shook her
head, trying to clear her eyes, but they pressed in even more deeply. Did she
have to sing? Should she have brought one of the candles? Her mother had said
something about using both of them together. But she didn’t know anything. All
she knew was that she needed to know if this was who she was supposed to be.
As she stared at the bird,
the wind floated over her arms and hands, and then the breeze kicked up,
pulling her hair out in tendrils. She imagined the bird as it must have been in
life: sandpipers scurried along the ground, their toothpick legs moving so
quickly they were a blur. As she stared at the bird in the box, the shadows
seemed to play tricks on her. Her vision blurred and doubled and then tripled,
the outlines of the ground hazy in all the ways her vision had refracted. She
shook her head, and when she did, her eyesight was back to normal.
The wind ruffled through
the bird’s mangled feathers, and Constance was just about to put the lid back
on the box, ready to be done with this perverse experiment, when it happen.
The bird’s eye opened, and
where there should have been a glassy, ink-drop eye there was a maggot. And
then the bird blinked.
Her chest heaved for a few
moments, and then she crawled on her hands and knees to the box.
She had to make
sure.
The bird’s head rested
feebly on the cardboard, and it could do nothing more than blink at her,
maggots inching their way across its decomposing flesh. And then her heart
plummeted. It was now alive when it was supposed to be dead. She had done this;
she had made this monstrosity. Tears pricked her eyes. It had been easy—was it
supposed to be this easy?—to just bring it to life. Now she had to send it
back, and that was going to be hard. Her stomach heaved as she grabbed a heavy
rock from the rock bed and raised it over her head. As it came smashing down,
the tears poured down her cheeks, and she had so many thoughts racing through
her head that she couldn’t untangle them all until one finally threaded its way
to the forefront.
She would go along with her
mother on this necromancy thing, but she could never, ever tell her about
tonight.
Annie adores writing and reading YA novels. She grew up with an insatiable desire to read and then came the insatiable desire to write. Annie has been blessed to have both of those in her life.
Away from her writing, Annie is the mother of the most adorable girls in the world, has the best husband in the world, and lives in the hottest place in the world (not really, but Phoenix sure feels like it). She loves to cook, sing, and play the piano.
Website: http://www.annieoldham.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/annieoldhambooks
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/annie_oldham
Tour-Wide Giveaway
Thank you so much for being a part of the Possession tour! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving :)
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