COMPLETED PROJECTS
ALL THESE DARK THINGS (as Sarah John Bromley; adult dark urban fantasy)
The dead talk and, unless she wants to lose her life, seventeen-year-old Vivien Blaise must listen.
Armed with a rosary and Magic 8-Ball, Vivien raises hell—and the walking dead. It’s her family’s curse, not to mention illegal. After an attack by two bounty hunters puts one bad guy in the grave and her father under arrest, the dead warn Vivien: help them or they’ll never stop following her, and neither will the hunter who survived.
Making matters worse, Vivien’s lover Dez Castillo is so tormented by the whispers of Los Muertos—the dead—that he attempts to join them. Yet Vivien needs Dez and his dark gift to answer the demands of the dead and outlast the living determined to destroy her.
In an underworld where every day is the Day of the Dead, Vivien travels between New England and New Mexico to silence restless souls, escape a bounty hunter hell-bent on fulfilling his own warped desires, and uncover the truth of why she and Dez need each other now more than ever if they hope to stay alive.
TINDERBOX (dark gothic paranormal YA)
High school senior and reluctant empath, Vayda Silver can sense a catastrophe in the making. Two years ago, vigilante neighbors killed her mother in a house fire. To avoid the same fate, Vayda conceals her abilities to hear others’ thoughts and feel their emotions. Her veil of normalcy is shredded not only by her brother Jonah’s cavalier displays of psychic power but also her inability to control the energy she siphons from others before it becomes destructive. Meanwhile, a long-held grudge against her family threatens to destroy them. Her only comfort is Ward Ravenscroft, a troubled misfit seeking solace from a neglectful father. With Ward’s help, can Vayda balance her powers with her wish for a normal life while saving her family from another tragedy?
HAZARD HOUSE (horror YA)
16-year-old Lottie’s attic is filled with dollhouses, each she handcrafts, each a miniature replica of the crime scenes filling her psychic visions. Before her gift answered questions for families seeking truth, then her visions betrayed her and ruined a young man’s life. Now she can’t stop herself from building the Hazard House, the site of a family’s grisly murder. She becomes convinced the wrong person, the secretive Jason Hazard, was convicted of the crime, and her suspicion is confirmed by Jason’s friend, Theo Red Moon, who warns her to be wary of what she meddles in. Theo swears Jason wasn’t born a murderer. When dabbling in the occult, a dark entity got into Jason. Something satisfied only by blood and terror. As Lottie uncovers the truth about the Hazard family, she is tugged between her drive to vindicate Jason, her bond with Theo, and her fear that her visions could be wrong again. Her mind’s eye sees wicked things. What she doesn’t know is they see her, too.
Works in Progress
SEVEN DEVILS IN A PIE (as Sarah John Bromley; adult magic realism)
In Seven Devils, Minnesota, a child hatches from a cocoon, a boy flies away on a kite, and a lonely divorcee inherits a killer pie recipe. For years, the three Sisters Anderson and the other elders have kept the town’s secrets. When elder Marianne Radcliff succumbs to a stroke, the Sisters know it’s time to share the secrets with the next generation, starting with Marianne’s great-niece Lorelei. Seven demons reside in the town and have been bribed into dormancy for the past fifty years. Now they are restless, and Crow Forsythe is the exorcist dispatched to hunt them down. Only his search leads him to Lorelei, and soon the pair are unsure who is friend and who is something else altogether. What they do know is Lorelei bakes a mean pie, and all devils like it where it’s piping hot.
FATHOM (horror YA)
In Fathom, Wisconsin, seventeen-year-old Noah Sedgewick has 260 days of sobriety. The only way he’ll reach 261 is to avoid Kasey Varsling, his former best friend, and that means ignoring Kasey’s midnight calls for help. Now Kasey’s dead, found floating face-down in the Fathom reservoir. Drugs, the townspeople whispered. Misadventure, Noah’s coroner father ruled.
But Noah knows Kasey’s death was intentional.
As he retraces the last days of Kasey’s life, Noah unearths Fathom’s history overflowing with epidemics, floods, and murder. Some call the town cursed. They’re not entirely wrong. Fathom devours its own to tame the ghosts of a wrongly executed boy and his bitter sister. As Noah connects these deaths to Kasey’s, he unearths a conspiracy to keep the town’s curse alive and discovers everything he’s worked so hard to find—his parents’ trust, his sobriety, his life—is about to be lost.