.png)
Two brothers return to their family home to care for their dying father, only to find the ghosts of their pasts are restless and hungry for blood in this gothic horror, perfect for fans of Hereditary and readers of Stephen Graham Jones. When their father calls them to tell them he is dying, Nick and Joshua rush back to their Nebraskan childhood home, Stag’s Crossing, hoping for a deathbed reconciliation with the man who raised them. But their return sparks memories of their childhood, and their father—Carlyle—a ruthless, violent racist who ruled Stag’s Crossing with an iron fist and disowned Joshua for marrying a woman of Asian descent.
Very quickly, the family find themselves falling into familiar patterns. Joshua and his father renew their tight bonds. As his long-buried memories of a youthful romance with another boy resurface, Nick finds himself ostracised and growing closer to Emilia, his brother’s enigmatic wife. But something else has arrived at Stag’s Crossing, a presence out for revenge, and Nick, Joshua and Carlyle, who have traded in blood, dirt and violence for so long, are about to face a reckoning like no other.
Inspired by Kailee Pedersen’s own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut draws on ancient Chinese mythology to explore the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.
Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781803368740
Imprint: Titan Books
A delicately braided and unflinching tale of inherited family damage and revenge that walks a careful line between the realistic and the supernatural, crossing from one into the other before you--or the hapless characters--are fully aware. Sacrificial Animals reads like what might happen if Cormac McCarthy and Lafcadio Hearn were stuck waiting out a snowstorm in Nebraska and decided to collaborate.
-Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of HellSacrificial Animals is distinctly observant, and distinctly unsettling. It begins with one sort of menace and ends with another entirely, so that while the book barely leaves its little patch of acres, and the souls who occupy it hardly move an inch from the traumas that shaped them long ago, it leaves you with a feeling of immense distances traveled.
-Kevin Brockmeier, New York Times Bestselling authorSacrificial Animals is an absolutely startling novel. Shot through with a rich vein of violence, toxic relationships, and a simmering undercurrent of folkloric magic, Kailee Pedersen's hypnotic prose conjures Cormac McCarthy so deftly you might think she'd resurrected him.
-Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of Where the Dead Wait