The Bad Ones: A Novel
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Synopsis
NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Melissa Albert returns with THE BAD ONES, a supernatural horror novel about four mysterious disappearances in a town haunted by a sinister magical history
Goddess, goddess, count to five
In the morning, who’s alive?
In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town.
Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local lore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games. . . .
An arresting, crossover horror fantasy threaded with dark magic, THE BAD ONES is a poison-pen love letter to semi-toxic best friendship, the occult power of childhood play and artistic creation, and the razor-thin line between make-believe and belief.
Release date: February 20, 2024
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Print pages: 352
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The Bad Ones: A Novel
Melissa Albert
About This Book
Bestselling author Melissa Albert returns with The Bad Ones, a supernatural horror novel about four mysterious disappearances in a town haunted by a sinister magical history
Bestselling author Melissa Albert returns with The Bad Ones, a supernatural horror novel about four mysterious disappearances in a town haunted by a sinister magical history
Goddess, goddess, count to five
In the morning, who’s alive?
In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town.
Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local lore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games. . . .
An arresting, crossover horror fantasy threaded with dark magic, The Bad Ones is a poison-pen love letter to semi-toxic best friendship, the occult power of childhood play and artistic creation, and the razor-thin line between make-believe and belief.
Imprint Publisher
Flatiron Books
ISBN
9781250894892
A Most Anticipated Book (Goodreads, Tor.com, Book Riot, Amazon, and more)!
“The supernatural creep factor is extreme, and there are secrets aplenty in this compelling and eerie tale.” —Booklist, starred review
“Unholy, vengeful, and utterly captivating. The Bad Ones delivers on Melissa Albert’s status as a modern horror master, and burns with a steady, corrosive clarity, not unlike a developing photograph revealing unseen evils.” —Ryan La Sala, author of The Honeys
“A deliciously dark and twisted labyrinth of a book from the master of YA horror. Peopled with some of the most believable teenage characters I've read, and full of the fervor and sharp edges of teen girl friendships, The Bad Ones had me hooked until the very last page.” —Heather Fawcett, author of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries
“Melissa Albert writes the kind of horror that doesn’t just make you check under your bed—it makes you check your own reflection in the mirror. A black-veined, spectral howl of a novel, The Bad Ones cements Albert as the contemporary queen of suburban fantasy.” —Ava Reid, author of A Study in Drowning
“As twisting and intriguing as a puzzle box, The Bad Ones reveals secret after sinister secret, unfolding chilling layers right until the very end. Melissa Albert is a master of the uncanny.” —Erin A. Craig, author of House of Roots and Ruin
“The intensity of teen friendships is both fantastical and horrifying in Albert’s latest masterpiece. At turns achingly sweet and bitingly vicious—much like its characters—The Bad Ones is a tense, lyrical, and haunting must-read.” —Kiersten White, author of Mister Magic
“The Bad Ones opens with a terrifying and unsettling sequence of disappearances—and then the tension never relents. With beguiling prose and a simmering sense of dread, the book kept me absolutely spellbound as its darkly supernatural mystery unfolded." —Kate Alice Marshall, author of What Lies in the Woods
“I’m not the first to call Melissa Albert's writing magical and I won't be the last. In this latest, the spell she casts is in the intractable ties that form between girls, the kind that tangle into knots, the kind that make nets that both save and ensnare. Unsettling and unputdownable.” —Kendare Blake, author of Three Dark Crowns
“Albert seamlessly braids the murky past with the pin-sharp present to create a masterful horror-thriller with a bruised and tender heart.” —Laura Steven, author of The Society for Soulless Girls
“Stunning and immersive, The Bad Ones will entrance you in its hypnotic mythology ruled by the sinister powers of imagination. The real and the imagined collide in this haunting small town mystery shrouded in creeping dread, packed with twists, and brimming with revelations about the nature of good and evil and justice and vengeance. I dare you to put it down!” —Katy de Becerra, author of When Ghosts Call Us Home
“The Bad Ones is a slow-burning yet delectable story so sinister I wanted to keep reading it forever. Albert's prose is juicy and sharp, and will haunt you in all the best ways.” —Jamison Shea, author of I Feed Her to the Beat and the Beast Is Me
“The Bad Ones is a thrilling reminder of what horror that respects its audience can feel like. This was an addictively terrifying, beautifully vicious book.” —Courtney Summers, author of The Project
“By taking readers on a sublime journey where we are compelled to figure out a supernatural mystery as well as who her characters really are, Melissa Albert has crafted a unique tale with its own rhythm. A haunting, refreshingly layered story that will most certainly stay with you.” —Clarence A. Haynes, co-author of Nubia: The Awakening
“Albert successfully evokes adolescence’s fraught hyperreality using richly textured, authentically angsty characters and a storytelling style by turns ethereal and electric.” —Publishers Weekly
Melissa Albert
Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of the Hazel Wood series (The Hazel Wood, The Night Country, Tales from the Hinterland) and Our Crooked...
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2024
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2024
Melissa Albert: The Bad Ones
Join Melissa Albert, the New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood, for a discussion of her new young adult supernatural horror novel, The Bad Ones.
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The Bad Ones
Author: Melissa Albert
PROLOGUE
“BE GOOD.”
“Uh-huh.” Chloe Park angled her head to look at the house’s top-floor windows. Two were yellow-lit, edged in pale curtain. That would be Piper’s bedroom. She could picture it already. Trophies and craft supplies, inspirational posters rendered in sugary neon.
“Chloe.”
Her mother said it forcefully enough that Chloe looked. The older woman’s hands gripped the wheel, manicured nails and a wedding band so delicate it looked like gold thread.
“Be good,” she repeated. “Please.”
“Okay, Mommy.” Chloe shouldered her overnight bag and left the car.
* * *
Piper Sebranek had brown eyes, shiny brown horse hair that fell to the middle of her back, and a reputation for supreme niceness. Chloe got the sense Piper had been the queen of her junior high, but look at her now. Just another freshman nobody.
She and Chloe weren’t friends, obviously, but their mothers worked together at a law firm in the city. Two days ago Piper dropped a birthday party invitation on Chloe’s desk in American Lit, all the details written in swoopy calligraphy on lilac card stock.
Chloe had skimmed it, then said, “You couldn’t have just told me this?”
Piper smiled with her glossy lips only, fingers fraying the end of her ponytail. “My mom made me invite you.”
So. Maybe not that nice. Chloe smiled back. “Can’t wait.”
By 8 p.m. she was regretting her decision. She would’ve pretended to pass out early, but Piper’s weird private school friend Diahann had announced she’d be drawing a mustache on the first person who fell asleep. A mustache. These dorks.
Diahann brought a Tarot deck, Anjali three cigarettes in a ziplock bag, two of them snapped and leaking. Ashley got really wild and pulled out a whole hard lemonade. Everyone but Chloe took turns sipping it, after which Diahann stripped to her bra and lay on the floor, whisper-screaming, “I can feel it!”
Diahann fell asleep first. Piper covered her with a fleece blanket and put on Booksmart, then dumped the contents of a fat cosmetics bag onto the green-and-blue rag rug. Good stuff, Chloe noted. Sephora brands.
“Makeup!” Ashley clapped her hands like the makeup had put on a little show. She approached Chloe with a brush in one outheld hand. “You have the shiniest hair,” she began.
This happened a lot. People saw Chloe’s size and prettiness and age, a year younger than anyone else in their grade, and thought, pet.
“Fuck off,” she said.
After that, they left her alone.
When the movie was over the other girls hugged each other, then took turns going to the bathroom with their toiletry bags and their neat little piles of folded pajamas. The lamp went off and Chloe faced the wall. Bursts of giggly whispering broke out with decreasing frequency until finally the room was quiet. For a while after that she lay unmoving in the glow of Piper’s night-light, tracking the shallow breath of the sleepers.
Chloe rolled over. She watched Piper’s face, making sure she really was out. After a minute it started to feel like Piper knew she was being watched. Enjoyed it, even. Like any moment she’d open her eyes and wink. What a creep.
Chloe sat up. Hands braced on the floor, she slid both legs from her sleeping bag, then crab-walked to the rag rug. From the makeup still lying in a glitzy pile she selected a pot of blackberry gloss, a NARS eyeliner, and a ribbed tube of Charlotte Tilbury lipstick, pushing them into the bottom of her bag.
The other girls slept on. Their breathing was soft, their closed eyelids untroubled, their small dreams stocked, no doubt, with cute boyfriends. Chloe rose to her feet.
A unicorn mug full of pens sat on the desk between the windows. She selected a black permanent marker and crouched beside Diahann. In two thick lines she inked a mustache above the girl’s upper lip, curling twice at its ends like a cartoon villain’s.
The other three were squished together on the bed. Chloe considered their faces, but Diahann’s mustache had scratched the itch. She moved on to their phones.
Piper’s and Anjali’s had passcodes. Ashley’s had face recognition. Chloe leaned across the bed, held the phone over the girl’s slack face, and nudged her shoulder. Then again, harder. Ashley’s eyes shuttered open. She breathed in through her nose, blinked twice, and rolled onto her side, still asleep.
The phone unlocked. Chloe sat cross-legged on the floor, taking her time looking through Ashley’s texts, DMs, photos, boring boring boring, then she stopped.
Two weeks ago Ashley stood in front of a bathroom mirror with one hand on her hip and the other at the level of her eyes, taking a photo of her reflection. Her expression was inward, absorbed. You could tell the photo had been taken for her reference alone. She was naked from the waist up.
Chloe considered it a moment, impassively. Then she texted it to herself, deleted the text from Ashley’s phone, and replaced it where it had lain.
Restlessly she surveyed the room. The air that had felt so alive to her minutes ago, so shiny-dark with possibilities, was dead now. It lay like flat seltzer on her tongue.
But the rest of the house remained. A pocket world in which only she was awake.
If the feeling she had, easing into the hallway, were a sound, it’d be a tonic note. If it were a scent, it would be matches and cut lime. Sometimes she tried to imagine a future that would allow her an endless supply of it, but all she could think of was cat burglar. Or Manson girl. The closed double doors of the main bedroom pulsed invitingly at the end of the hall. But there was risky, and there was stupid. Down the stairs she went.
The ground floor was dark. Chloe turned left into the little den beside the stairs, a place of deep chairs, a cold fireplace, and a pretty cabinet full of bottles. Wine, port, gemstone liquors with Italian-sounding names. The only thing she recognized was a half-full bottle of Cuervo. It’d be funny, she thought, to stash the bottle in Piper’s room, some place where her mom would find it before Piper did. The thought hardened into a plan. She tucked it under her arm, stepping noiselessly from the den.
A light had come on in the kitchen.
Chloe paused. Her heart was gently sparking, the way it always did when she got caught, or was about to, or almost did. She didn’t notice it, but she was smiling. Tequila bottle hanging from her hand, she walked toward the light.
Then she stopped, thrown by the sight of a girl she didn’t know.
The girl stood with her back to the doorway. Her head was bowed over the sink, hands braced against the imitation marble. Piper’s older sister, she must be, but Chloe’s brain supplied no name. Was she about to vomit? She’d probably just snuck in drunk.
“Hi,” Chloe said brightly.
The girl whipped around. Chloe took an involuntary step back. The girl’s breathing was audible, her pupils massive. Chloe revised her guess: not drunk. High.
“Chloe,” she said. Her voice was odd, her face a little bit familiar.
“Yep.” Chloe gave a derisive sniff. There was a smell in the kitchen, plasticky and unnatural. It was coming from the girl. “No offense, but you reek.”
Piper’s sister nodded without speaking. Eyes fixed on hers, nod, nod, until her bobbing head seemed toylike. Chloe felt a rare stab of unease and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging the bottle of Cuervo. The other girl hadn’t even mentioned it. “You’re staring at me.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl said softly.
She sounded sorry. Like, genuinely. It creeped Chloe right out.
“Thirteen.”
“What?” Chloe snapped. She was still standing on the threshold, and forced herself to take a step into the kitchen.
“You’re thirteen,” Piper’s sister repeated. Her eyes ran over Chloe’s face. As if, just by looking at her, she could smell the matches, hear the tonic note. “That’s a bad age for a girl.”
A prickle ran over Chloe’s neck. She rolled her eyes to hide it. “Whatever. I’m going upstairs. Maybe you can go find a shower.”
“Stop,” the girl said.
Chloe did. Why, though? There was something in the way the girl said it. The word a wick of sharp command, her voice burning around it like a flame.
So. Chloe did stop. She did turn and look and feel all her superpowers—cruelty and nerve, a cast-iron stomach—dissolve like cotton candy at the sight of the blackness that massed around and behind the girl’s head, not shadows nor hair nor anything else she could put a word to.
“I’m sorry,” the stranger said one more time.
And Chloe remembered. Piper was an only child.
* * *
Away, away. Over a mile of winter-cracked blacktop and freeze-dried lawn to a car parked crookedly on a pastoral suburban road. Benjamin Tate sat in the driver’s seat.
He was crying. Not crying as a grown-up cries, though he was past forty, but like a child, loud and snotty and unchecked. Faint heat spilled from the vents and the car’s windows were covered with a censoring steam. Its interior smelled like clear liquor and stomach acid and a cologne so popular, once upon a time, that just one whiff of it could induce instant flashbacks in an entire generation. The song he’d put on repeat ended and began again.
Benjamin pressed his forehead into the wheel’s slick hide. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked the air.
The car was a green Kia Soul, its paint job rendered inoffensive by moonlight. To its right, a row of sleeping two-stories. To its left, a gray expanse of fields, pocked here and there by soccer nets. Benjamin had grown up in this place. Everywhere he looked he could see ghosts of his younger, better self. Here came one now, sloping across the field in baggy Umbros like a slacker godling.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Help me.”
He was speaking, again, to no one. But this time, someone answered.
“Stop.”
The word was heavy with disgust. The man sucked in a gasp that lodged in his chest like a swallowed cough drop. With it came an odor that overwhelmed even the Drakkar slathered over his wrists. It was the house-fire scent of things that should not have been burned.
There was a girl in his backseat. Her face was in shadow but he could see right away that she wasn’t his girl.
“What are you doing in my car?” With every tick of his shitty old heart embarrassment was replacing fear. Embarrassment and fury and a different kind of anxiety: What did she see? What did she know? He was drunk enough that he didn’t stop to wonder how she’d gotten past a locked car door.
As fucked as he was, things could easily get worse. So he breathed in deeply and made his voice low. His voice, that gritty golden thing he used to believe would carry him free, up and out of this mediocre town. At least he could still use it to convince.
“I hope I didn’t scare you,” he said, though he’d been the one near to screaming. “Are—are you supposed to tell me something? Did she send you out here to give me a message?”
The word she cracked in the middle. It added another layer to his shame, and shame kindled anger. “Well? Talk.”
The girl leaned forward until just her mouth was caught in a beam of streetlight. The smile it illuminated filled him with an instant, atavistic terror. The kind that hid in your backbrain, only showing itself when you were on the brink of something irreversible.
Get out of the car.
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