Don't Let Her In

By Adalind Monroe

The quiet village of Czern Lesovitsa haunts the edge of the ominous Black Forest, but it's not the bleak shadows and eerie silence emanating from the woods that weigh on the villagers and drain the vibrancy from their dreams.

What evil could rob people of their passion without driving them away? What keeps them living their colorless lives? And how can the chilling melody of little girl's lullaby lead someone to ruin? These are the questions an outsider from the bustling streets of London seeks to answer, but will information hidden in the village's secrets be more than man was meant to know? And how many questions can safely be answered before the risk losing your soul becomes too great to ignore?

Find out the chilling answers in "Don't Let Her In", the weird fiction tale called "Pitch-perfect" with "elegant language and 'missing pieces' that drew me in and kept me thinking about it afterwards."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frowzy Books
• Release date: Jul 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476387079

Adalind Monroe

Born in San Diego, California, and raised by actors, Adalind grew up playing in the shadow of the stage. Despite a genetic interest in theatre, her passion for the written word has characterized her life, from the first recorded horror piece ("We were almost scared to death, but if we had been scared to death we would probably be dead." - cir. 1990 approx.), to the thirteen year labor of love that is the epic high fantasy saga of Eleasia, writing is without a doubt her greatest love. Though she is contractually obligated to say that, in fact, her best friend is her greatest love, they both know the truth. One of the few constants she can confidently claim in her life thus far (beyond far too many animals at any given time, and a loving and supportive family of crazy people), writing took a place of prominence only when she had to ask herself "What do I want to do with my life?" That constant that had so characterized her childhood, even more than being surrounded by actors, became the answer to any question you could ask her, especially when it makes no literal sense. "Would you like fries with that?" "No thank you; I'm a writer." Though fantasy is without a doubt her dominant genre, her roots in supernatural suspense and horror have never lost their place in her heart. After discovering she was fully capable of writing short stories (a feat she believed utterly impossible, and laughable if suggested), she found her thoughts returning to the kinds of stories that had so captured her imagination when she was a child. Preferring to eschew the trappings of modern horror, Ms. Monroe's tales tend toward the sub-genres of "Weird Fiction" and "Psychological Horror" when not entirely drenched in High Fantasy. And if you're entirely unaware, she's widely recognized as an accomplished humorist. You can tell your friends. Adalind lives in beautiful Southern Oregon with four cats, two dogs, two other dogs, and a lizard named Obi-Wan. The lizard is definitely a Jedi.

Book preview

Don't Let Her In

By Adalind Monroe

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright 2012 by Adalind Monroe

*****

A roiling, biting agitation took me when I first began to see her. A figment, a shade, her presence just out of sight. Always out of sight. My heart would give a lurch, though I knew not why, and despite my best attempts to capture sight of her movement, she would always flee in the flickering of an eye, leaving confusion and a disquieting sense of isolation in her wake.

Upon coming to the village, almost too small to warrant even that generous a title, I found a kind of spirit shared among its people that I had never before seen. A nameless, nagging worry seemed to weigh on them, dusting their shoulders in a film