Such a Pretty Smile

A deeply unsettling and shocking feminist horror novel from a bold new talent, Kristi DeMeester.

A biting novel from an electrifying new voice, Such a Pretty Smile is a heart-stopping tour-deforce about powerful women, angry men, and all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to silence them.

There's something out there that's killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don't know when to shut up.

2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can't share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she's seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother - the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice - until she is punished for using it.

2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape - both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fianc is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waives her 'problem' away with pills. But Caroline's past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can't understand.

'Wonderfully well written; the dread, the enigma, build with each scene. It's coming of age, it's family secrets, it's life in the balance, too. It's Thomas Harris, it's Lois Duncan...but no, it's Kristi DeMeester, in complete confident control of your experience. An outstanding story in outstanding hands.' - Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie

'Kristi DeMeester's novel is a menacing, mysterious, and righteously angry fever dream, one that hooks into you from page one. Such a Pretty Smile is unafraid to bare its feminist fangs.' - Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song

'I've never read anything quite like Such a Pretty Smile: at turns brutal and shocking, at turns lush and evocative, and deeply disquieting throughout. Kristi DeMeester is a highly-original voice in horror and I can't wait to see what she writes next.' - emily m. danforth

"With expert pacing and captivating characters, Kristi DeMeester's Such a Pretty Smile is a gothic thriller that speaks to the strength of women. A darkly feminist and timely novel, I was spellbound until the final page.' - Karma Brown, bestselling author of Recipe for a Perfect Wife

Kristi DeMeester is the author of Beneath, a novel published by Word Horde Publications, and Everything That's Underneath, a short fiction collection from Apex Books. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Horror Volume 9, 11, and 12 Stephen Jones' Best New Horror, Year's Best Weird Fiction Volumes 1, 3, and 5 in addition to publications such as Pseudopod, Black Static, Fairy Tale Review, and several others. In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first.

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