M. L. Rio

The bestselling author of international BookTok sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story of a group of misfits who meet in the local cemetery each night to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave. Every night, in the college's ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn't there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom? Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks--and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought. Atmospheric and eerie, featuring an ensemble of misfits that fans will love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio's inimitable style.

the highly anticipated new book by the author of the BookTok sensation If We Were Villains

Graveyard Shift

Romy

After trying and failing to find a better job, trying and failing to make her marriage work, trying and failing to give up smoking, trying and failing to take care of herself as she sank into the quicksand of depressive lethargy, Tamar had come to think of herself, generally, as a failure.

Friends and lovers came and went, but the Toyota was forever.

I’ve only been trying to sleep since the day I was born, and googling home remedies never occurred to me.

mari

Hannah flicked her first butt into the hole. They all leaned toward the center of the circle, watched it disap- pear. “Maybe,” she said, “it's for somebody who's not dead yet.”

“THE DARK LORD DEMANDS BLOOD SACRIFICE!”

smile??

She learned to live in the permanent twilight of sleep-deprivation psychosis. Life, if you could call it that, was a never-ending out-of-body experience.

Lockley was, whatever her shortcomings, objectively beautiful. And objectively beautiful people could bend the rules in a way objectively average people could not.

james cao

"Whoa." Edie stopped suddenly and Tuck walked right into her. She pointed the light up at the massive, weird mosaic of Saint Anthony. Paint had been applied directly to the plaster, embellished with shards of mirror and colored glass gems that glittered like the embers of a fire dying out— deep bloody reds and oxidized orange. The saint himself held, in one hand, a leash tethered to a stout, squatting creature that could have been a pig or an ugly hairless dog. In the other, he clutched an even uglier doll, with cabbage-like leaves sprouting out of its head. The doll had no hands or feet, but instead four hairy, rootlike protuberances where its hands and feet should have been. Which was not to say that there were no hands or feet at all. The most unsettling part of the icon was the half dozen disembodied hands and feet floating in midair above the hermit's head-a grotesque mobile of amputated limbs.

Tuck had started to cry, but the rat had stopped struggling. Grip loose, neck limp. Head like a soft, rotten walnut in the hollow of his palm. One foot twitched feebly, and he almost threw up in his lap.

He turned right and continued down the side street, where a few cars were parked in the gritty pink light of the few anemic streetlamps.

Graveyard Shift quotes

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