Patricia Wants to Cuddle

by Samantha Allen, Justis Bolding, Laura Knight Keating, Susan Bennett, Jasmin Walker

Genres: LGBT & Pride; Horror; Thrillers

Synopsis

'So much fun!' Lilly Wachowski 'Horrifying and delightful' Kristen Arnett Renee has made it: she's in the final four. But is she dying to win? Renee should be thrilled to have been chosen as one of the final four contestants in The Catch, the world's biggest reality show. But now she, the other contestants, and Jeremy 'the Catch' have arrived on the remote, wooded island for the final show, Renee begins to wonder if there's something wrong. Is she taking a bigger risk than she realised? And as she and the other contestants begin their final challenges, they slowly start to realise that the island they've been taken to is hiding a terrifying secret - one that could make the final Elimination Event all too real. What readers are saying 'THIS WAS INSANE IN THE BEST WAY I AM OBSESSED' 'A gloriously bonkers book' 'This book sucked me in and I couldn't put it down!' 'One of my favorite books this year!!' 'It's a wild ride.' 'Funny and smart, it's also surprisingly tender.' 'It was a genuine page turner.'

Release date: June 28, 2022

Publisher: Zondo

Sample

Renee

The plane hits a bit of turbulence and Renee Irons can’t help but picture it going down, the oxygen masks falling from the cabin ceiling like discarded party favors, the screams of the other passengers sounding high and shrill, as though anything could stop the flame from consuming them all in the end. Some people think it would be an awful way to die but the only terror lies in the waiting—the minute or so it takes at high altitude for your oxygen-deprived brain to give up on self-preservation. When the jet slams into the ground, death comes too quick for it to hurt.

“Trash?” the flight attendant asks, walking down the aisle one last time before the descent, jarring Renee out of her grim reverie. “Trash? Trash?”

The man with frosted tips twenty years past their expiration date says it like a question, but as he draws nearer to the Catch girls, Renee hears his tone become a touch more declarative.

“Trash? Trash? Trash.”

To be fair, Renee has made the same association before. Reality show contestants aren’t unlike the two half-empty bags of pretzels Renee throws out as the flight attendant walks past her row: mostly air, empty calories consumed rapidly and forgotten just as fast.

That includes Renee, too, she supposes. Maybe she’s read more books than the other girls, but whenever she catches herself feeling superior, she remembers she made the same choice they did to come on this show. Whoever they were before, they’re heading to the same place now. Ultimately, they’ll all be flattened into pixels and LEDs, reduced to the stuff of sorority house small talk and boxed-wine-fueled internet debates.

Amanda fidgets in the seat to Renee’s right, brushing her middle-parted strawberry blond hair out of her face before dropping her hands to her lap. Some empty pretzel bags are prettier than others, Renee muses, catching herself staring at Amanda’s nose. She tries to decide whether she was born with it, or whether a surgeon had shaped it into a perfect button, though the answer isn’t important, because it’s cute either way.

“Here we go!” Amanda chirps, turning to face her, smiling through a bump. “Two more weeks!”

“Well, for half of us,” Renee says.

Amanda tightens her seatbelt around the waist of her purple floral-print leggings.

“Oh, girl! I’m sure Jeremy’s taking you to the finale. Did you see the way he was staring at you back at the airport?”

Gross.

Yes, Renee had noticed Jeremy’s leering back at the gate. This is partly why she half-wishes that one—or both—of the jet’s engines would fail, although if she’s being honest with herself, those thoughts long predate her time on this stupid show. The other girls might like the lust in Jeremy’s gaze. A few years ago, it would have made Renee feel wanted, too. Desire can be such a heady substitute for self-confidence. But she’s trying to stop searching for herself in the eyes of others—especially the dead eyes of a greasy-haired gym junkie.

Amanda is still eyeing her expectantly, as if she’d just missed the part where Renee gushed about the Catch. The light turbulence of the plane nosing down saves Renee, mercifully, from having to lie.

“Have you ever been to Seattle?” she asks Amanda instead.

A question for a question. It’s a strategy that usually works when Renee wants to hide how she’s feeling. Most people like talking about themselves more than they even realize. Renee knows she can get away with only doling out tiny, diet-size slices of herself in her few friendships if she just keeps her interlocutors talking. That’s how none of her coworkers back in Tampa know her birthday or her alma mater or that her favorite food is steak frites, and the evasion always works unless the person you’re talking to—

“No, have you been?” Amanda asks.

Damn it.

Renee hadn’t pegged her for the curious type.

“I’ve only been once,” Renee offers, “but I thought you would have come here for a fashion event at some point?”

“A fashion event in Seattle? What, like a raincoat runway walk? A North Face show?”

Amanda throws her head back and laughs at her own joke. Renee would never tell anyone, and she can barely admit it to herself, but she finds that squeaky giggle sort of charming. The sound of it makes the insides of her elbows feel funny, like they used to back in high school when her history teacher would announce a pop quiz and Renee had forgotten to do the reading.

Amanda probably never did her reading. She looks like the kind of girl who would have copied off of Renee. And Renee would have let her.

The plane tilts down at a steeper grade, then banks right. Through the window just past Amanda’s face, Renee can see the Seattle skyline come into view, a thousand white lights blinking against the inky night, construction cranes like enormous glowing crosses filling the few empty spaces between buildings.

“I don’t know,” Renee says, unthinking, distracted by the sight. “I think you’d make a great puffy-vest model.”

Renee feels instantly stupid and daubs away the light sweat forming on her forehead with a napkin. Amanda has already turned to stare out the oval window at the city below them. She may not have even heard.

Anyway, Amanda is the kind of girl who can swim straight through compliments hardly noticing them, like a guppy floating downriver. Maddening how that only seems to make her more beautiful.

“I think I see the Space Needle …” Amanda says, her face still glued to the window.

Renee is left by herself to listen to the cacophony of final descent: seatbelts clicking into place, tray tables locking into position, a waking baby crying somewhere in the back. She quickly scans the cabin of the plane, glancing at the young couple holding hands in the row across from them, and giving a polite but dutiful smile to the older woman next to her who’d joked that she always chooses aisle seats because her bladder is the size of a walnut now. Is this all there is waiting for Renee? Love, maybe, and then decay? Her body catching up with the rot in her brain?

Renee turns back toward Amanda and tries to drown out the noise, watching over the other girl’s shoulder as the plane descends, slowly—too slowly—and lands not with a fireball but with the dull thud of tires on tarmac, the earth insisting that Renee spend another day on its surface.

Vanessa

The musky sea air is a welcome reprieve from the cloud of Chanel Chance that Vanessa Voorhees has been inhaling ever since she and Amanda piled into the back of the same SUV at Sea–Tac. After living with a gaggle of girls for two months, she isn’t sure how much more estrogen she can take.

Shivering, she stares out at the blackness. The others, jet-lagged and weary, had trudged upstairs to the warmth of the heated passenger lounge once the rented fleet of Catch cars were all loaded onto the ferry, but Vanessa wanted a moment alone here on the vehicle deck before joining them.

Before her is a rusted rail and beyond it, a moonless abyss. Huge halogen bulbs housed in hazy plastic casings cast a bilious yellow pall over the concrete but fail to illuminate the darkness. Her inner ear and the sound of the 4,000-ton vessel pushing through the waves are her only clues that the boat is even moving. A look around confirms that apart from the Catch cars, there’s only a smattering of Jeeps and old Subarus parked on the deck. Very few people make the late-night trek to this island, shocker.

The eerie surroundings are more than worth the time away from Amanda’s yammering. Maybe upstairs she has found a local who’s interested in hearing about the difference between Glamstapix’s Glimmer feature and ClickClack’s Bursts, but Vanessa would much rather stay here and enjoy the dully roaring, reassuring constancy of the churning water.

Still, it would be too creepy to stay down here for long if it didn’t smell so nice, like sweat and salt, like her guy friends back home in Denver—a lot like Jeremy, come to think of it, sour and sweet.

God, she loves how he tastes. Vanessa wishes she could be burying her face in his neck right now instead of heading toward yet another empty hotel-room bed. Hopefully she doesn’t have a roommate this week. Back in Sacramento, Becca tried to make her stay up late and do DIY gel manicures and Vanessa wondered if she had died and gone to hell.

Only two more weeks, she reminds herself.

Then the other girls will be back home hawking subscription boxes on social media while Vanessa and Jeremy fuck each other in a dozen different countries, and preferably as close to the equator as possible. This boat really is freezing. It’s not like any of them would even know what to do with the eponymous Catch if they, well, caught him. Lilah-Mae probably wouldn’t even blow him, not that the beauty queen is anywhere near as innocent as she pretends to be.

Vanessa leans out over the railing and tries to let her eyes adjust to the darkness.

Soon, she can make out enormous shapes, monoliths hovering in the middle distance, titans lying in wait. Looking closer, she sees that they are cliffs, coastal ones, dotted by hundreds of trees emerging from the crags like bony fingers reaching for the stars. The water slapping against the hull of the boat sounds as though it’s trying to climb its way up the deck. And there, skittering between the gray lines of the trees, Vanessa can swear she sees something—a shadow, an animal?—scurrying along the cliffside nearest the ferry.

She leans out farther over the railing, away from the yellow light of the vehicle deck, ...