Christina Henry
The Mermaid
PRAISE FOR LOST BOY
“Christina Henry shakes the fairy dust off a legend; this Peter Pan will give you chills.”
Genevieve Valentine, author of Persona
“Multiple twists keep the reader guessing, and the fluid writing is enthralling . . . This is a fine addition to the shelves of any fan of children’s classics and their modern subversions.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This wild, unrelenting tale, full to the brim with the freedom and violence of young boys who never want to grow up, will appeal to fans of dark fantasy.”
Booklist
“Turns Neverland into a claustrophobic world where time is disturbingly nebulous and identity is chillingly manipulated . . . [A] deeply impactful, imaginative, and haunting story of loyalty, disillusionment, and self-discovery.”
RT Book Reviews (top pick)
“Henry keeps the story fresh and energetic with diabolical twists and turns to keep us guessing. Dynamic characterization and narration bring the story to life . . . Once again, Henry takes readers on an adventure of epic and horrific proportions as she reinvents a childhood classic using our own fears and desires. Her smooth prose and firm writing hooked me up instantly and held me hostage to the very end.”
Smexy Books
“We all have a soft spot for the classics that we read when we were growing up. But . . . this retelling will poke and jab at that soft spot until you can never look at it the same way again.”
Kirkus Reviews
“An absolutely addicting read . . . Psychological, gripping, and entertaining, painting a picture of Peter Pan before we came to know him in the film: the darker side of his history. The writing is fabulous, the plot incredibly compelling, and the characters entirely enthralling.”
Utopia State of Mind
PRAISE FOR ALICE
“I loved falling down the rabbit hole with this dark, gritty tale. A unique spin on a classic and one wild ride!”
Gena Showalter, New York Times bestselling author of The Darkest Promise
“Alice takes the darker elements of Lewis Carroll’s original, amplifies Tim Burton’s cinematic reimagining of the story, and adds a layer of grotesquery from [Henry’s] own alarmingly fecund imagination to produce a novel that reads like a Jacobean revenge drama crossed with a slasher movie.”
The Guardian (UK)
“[A] psychotic journey through the bowels of magic and madness. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed the ride.”
Brom, author of The Child Thief
“[A] horrifying fantasy that will have you reexamining your love for this childhood favorite.”
RT Book Reviews (top pick)
PRAISE FOR RED QUEEN
“Henry takes the best elements from Carroll’s iconic world and mixes them with dark fantasy elements . . . [Her] writing is so seamless you won’t be able to stop reading.”
Pop Culture Uncovered
“Alice’s ongoing struggle is to distinguish reality from illusion, and Henry excels in mingling the two for the reader as well as her characters. The darkness in this book is that of fairy tales, owing more to Grimm’s matter-of-fact violence than to the underworld of the first book.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
For Cora–on land and on sea
Part I
The Fisherman & the Mermaid
CHAPTER 1
Once there was a fisherman, a lonely man who lived on a cold and rocky coast and was never able to convince any woman to come away and live in that forbidding place with him. He loved the sea more than any person and so was never able to take a wife, for women see what is in men’s hearts more clearly than men would wish.
But though he loved the freezing spray on his face and the sight of the rolling clouds on the horizon, he still wished for somebody to love. One evening after a long day, he pulled up his net and found a woman in it—something like a woman, anyway, with black hair and eyes as grey as a stormy sea and a gleaming fish’s tail.
He was sorry that she was caught and told her so, though the storm in her eyes rolled into his heart. She stopped her thrashing and crashing at his voice, though she did not understand his words. The fisherman loosed her, and she dove back into the water the way a wild thing returns to a wild place, and he watched her go.
But her eyes had seen inside him the way that women’s eyes do, and his loneliness snaked into her, and she was sorry for it, for that loneliness caught her more surely than the net.
She swam away from his boat as fast as she could, and she felt his loneliness trailing between them like a cord. She did not want his feelings to bind her, to pull her back to him, so her tail flashed silver in the water and her eyes looked straight before her and never behind.
But though she didn’t look back, she felt him watching, and she remembered the shape of his boat and the rocky curve of the land not too far off and the lines around his eyes, eyes that were as dark as the deep sea under the moon. She remembered, and so she returned again to watch him.
She was called a name that meant, in her own tongue, Breaking the Surface of the Sea. When she was born, she’d come in a great hurry, much sooner than all of her six older sisters and brothers. The attendant who’d aided her mother had been astonished when she tried to swim away before the cord that bound her to her mother was cut.
Her mother and father and siblings spent most of her childhood trying to find her, for she was never where she ought to be. She was warned repeatedly of the dangers of the surface and of the men who cast nets there, and of their cruelty to the denizens of the ocean.
They should never have told her, for in the telling she wanted to know more, and wanting to know more led her farther and farther afield.
Her home was deep in the ocean, far away from the land that pushed up against the water on either side, and this was because her people feared the men with their hooks and their nets and the boats that floated on the surface of the waves as if by magic. The storytellers told of silver fins caught by cruel metal and dragged to the decks of ships, where blood ran red and spilled back into the water, calling things that swam the ocean in search of dying creatures.
Sometimes there was a storm, and that storm would batter a ship to pieces and the men would fall into the water and sink, sink, sink to the bottom—the lucky ones, that is. The unlucky ones were devoured by roaming hunters with their silver-grey bodies and black eyes and white, white teeth.
When the ships were sunk, the mermaid would go to the wreckage and explore, and pick up odd things that humans used, and wonder about them. And then one of her brothers or her parents would find her, and she would be chided for her foolishness and dragged home by her wrist, staring with longing over her shoulder all the while.