The Society of Secret Cats

By DeAnna Knippling

What if cats were really there to guard your dreams?

Lost in the Forest of Dreams, the dashing, handsome cat Ferntail must rescue his human girl from her horrible nightmares, nightmares that come from outside her mind.  Will a mysterious and beautiful cat from The Society of Secret Cats help lead them out of the forest...or further astray?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wonderland Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781501479144

DeAnna Knippling

DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer, editor, and book designer living in Colorado.  She started out as a farm girl in the middle of South Dakota, went to school in Vermillion, SD, then gravitated through Iowa to Colorado, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She now writes science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and mystery for adults under her own name; adventurous and weird fiction for middle-grade (8-12 year old) kids under the pseudonym De Kenyon; and various thriller and suspense fiction for her ghostwriting clients under various and non-disclosable names. Her latest book, Alice’s Adventures in Underland:  The Queen of Stilled Hearts, combines two of her favorite topics–zombies and Lewis Carroll. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Static, Penumbra, Crossed Genres, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and more. Her website and blog are at www.WonderlandPress.com.  You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Copyright Information

The Society of Secret Cats

Copyright © 2011 by De Kenyon

Cover image copyright © Archana Bhartia | Dreamstime.com

Cover design copyright © 2019 by DeAnna Knippling

Interior design copyright © 2019 by DeAnna Knippling

Published by Wonderland Press

All rights reserved. This books, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Discover more by this author at www.Wonderlandpress.com.

For Fafnir, whose luxurious tail guards my daughter’s sleep.

The Society of Secret Cats

Mice are delicious. But even more delicious are monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. Your mother or father might tell you that they are all in your head and that you’re just imagining things. In a way, they’re right. Monsters are all in your head.

But you’re not just imagining things.

· · ·

I was inside Jaela’s head with a tasty monster called an Aranea, dribbling slime and trying to skitter out of the way on its spider claws, when the entire world of dreams shook, as though being shifted around by an earthquake.

The Aranea crawled up the wall of Jaela’s bedroom, clinging to the ceiling, too scared even to spit acid at me, as I tried to keep Jaela from waking. It is bad when a dreamer wakes before you have eaten the monster, because the monster is able to escape the dreamer’s head, sometimes for a short time, sometimes for a long time, and cause mischief.

When I was a wee kitten, I let one of her monsters get out, and it threw a tantrum in her room, only disappearing when her parents appeared to find out what was the matter. Jaela hid in a corner and screamed, and wouldn’t stop screaming even when her parents asked her what was the matter.

She was punished for breaking toys and writing in crayon