Andrew Joseph White

New York Times bestselling author Andrew Joseph White's explosive gothic horror, set in an alternate Victorian England where mediums control the dead. Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all. London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing. After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

Cassidy Nolan

i am a haunting i am a poltergeist i am stuck here screaming

As soon as you were born with a womb, you were fucked.

I was to be just like everyone else, no matter how much distress it caused me. 

It is the only way anyone will ever tolerate you,

I want to peel off all my skin, if only so I could be anything other than a naked body, something horrifying instead of vulnerable. Nobody looks at a pig corpse and thinks it could be made beautiful.

The places where you hurry are harsh: I pray that you run more gently

if we still had the fingers to take out their eyes

Men all hurt us in their own unique ways. None of us carry the same bruises, the same aches.

She could power the world with how angry she is.

 work to be cruel. And yet they continue.

I want to curl up into a ball and stitch myself together so I can never be unraveled. I want to peel off all my skin if only so I could be anything other thana naked body, something horrifying instead of vulnerable. Nobody looks at a pig corpse and thinks it could be made beautiful.

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