by Rebecca Cremini
I am very happy to share that my first novella, Mouths of Stone, came out this month from Three Ocean Press.
The story follows Gaby, who takes this sort of subterranean detour in her life to avoid dealing with some tough family issues (longer and better blurb here). The opening scenes take place in Horne Lake Provincial Park, which is where the idea for the book also started.
I visited Horne Lake on a whim years ago to go caving (I had probably just watched The Descent and found it aspirational). Afterwards, I wrote a couple of pages describing what I'd seen there. Just impressions I thought were worth remembering. Most things I write down like this don't go anywhere, but I kept coming back to these images over the years. The cave I'd explored became the setting for all sorts of iterations - poems, flash, CNF, things more mundane or fantastical than what Mouths of Stone eventually became.
Ultimately, it was the perfect setting for Gaby because, similarly to a lot of folks who like dark fiction, sometimes going into a dark and creepy cave is a comfort compared to the crystal clear projection of what you think your life is going to be. So I'm hoping that there are a few folks who find a bit of themselves in Gaby, even though she's sort of a mess.
To celebrate the novella, I will be having a casual launch at Strange Fellow Brewing on October 24th. Come by and say hi!
