Tori Bovalino

In the small town of Winston, Pennsylvania, they fear the Lord of the Wood almost as much as they fear God. According to legend, the ghosts of the wood steal the babies of the town if they’re left unattended. But this legend has just become a way to scare local kids—until Leah Jones’s brother disappears. Leah has no hope for a future outside of Winston, and her only remaining solace is her music. She’s on the verge of dropping out of high school, barely balancing her job at the gas station with her duty to care for her baby brother, Owen. But when Owen is taken by the Lord of the Wood, Leah must face the dangers of the forest to write a song that will win Owen back—and discover the truth of how her life went so very wrong.

My Throat an Open Grave

Elena M.

In truth, I spend a lot of time inside my own head—so much that I think I’m distracted, so overwhelmed with my own little world that I forget there are other things going on outside of it.

That’s what we’re meant to fear, isn’t it? Not the things that look evil, but the ones that look just as sweet and nice as honey, the sins that come back to bite you like a viper lying in wait.

I wish I could look to the stars and whisper the name of my own personal god and be whisked away somewhere new, somewhere that didn’t hurt so much.

Levi-Mae 

“I am flesh and blood, and I am to be your reckoning.”

My grammy used to say that a routine was a kindness to the soul. That we weren’t meant to be spontaneous, to do things that were surprising and new. I used to disagree with her: Isn’t spontaneity, excitement, change the spice of life? But now, I see what she means. There’s comfort in routine, familiarity. Especially when the routine doesn’t feel like it’s actively stifling you as a person, swallowing you whole.

Tristan and Fletcher take turns reading me stories from a book of folktales from the wood. They’re not like our stories of princesses and kings and queens, but of Lords and trees and the spirit that resides in time.

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