We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Camilla Raines’ darkly magical fantasy debut The Hollow and the Haunted—available October 22nd from Titan Books.
In this darkly magical fantasy debut set in Washington State, a closeted teenage psychic foresees the death of his sworn enemy, and is forced to work with him to save his life. Sparks fly, but some ghosts don’t want to stay buried…
Miles Warren hails from a long line of psychics. Resigned to a life in the family business, Miles is perfectly happy, thank you very much—except that he’s constantly consumed by anxiety, hides his sexuality from almost everyone, and always feels exhausted from long nights spent wrangling angry ghosts. Perfectly happy.
Miles’ comfortable routine is interrupted when he starts to see the reflection of a strange boy in his mirror. He discovers the boy is none other than Gabriel Hawthorne, whose family have a mysterious, decades-long feud with Miles’ own—and that the visions are a premonition of his death. Gabriel is everything Miles expects from a Hawthorne—rude, snobbish, irritatingly good-looking—but Miles isn’t going to stand by and let someone murder him. (Even if he understands the impulse).
The two form an uneasy alliance, trying to work out who might want to kill Gabriel and prevent his death from taking place. As they uncover secrets about their families’ feud and dark magic swirls around the pair, Miles is horrified to realize that he doesn’t hate Gabriel as much as he’s supposed to. He might even like him.
Too bad Gabriel is almost certainly going to die.
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The Hollow and the Haunted
Camilla Raines is the author of several published short stories and was born and raised in a small town in Northern Washington with lots of Evergreen trees, fog, and rain. Her writing career began in elementary school, where she spent years writing fantasy stories for friends that were usually just knock-offs of whatever book she was devouring at the time. As a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community and someone who openly struggles with chronic anxiety, representation, diversity, identity, and acceptance are all important to her as a writer. Camilla can be found @camillaraine
Digging up a grave in a foggy, freezing cemetery at one in the morning was not how Miles wanted to spend his Thursday night.
Well, technically, it was Friday morning now, but technicalities had a way of falling between the cracks when he’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours straight. There was something completely mind-numbing about the repetitive motions of gravedigging—the crunch of his blade in the ground, the swoosh of the shovel, and the quiet thud of dirt that followed.
He’d already been here for several hours. His shirt was stuck to his back with sweat, and the newly formed blisters on his hands refused to be ignored. He shivered, having shrugged off his jacket and tossed it out of the steadily deepening hole, but hating the way the night air chilled his damp skin.
He hoped his mom would be awake and have food ready when he managed to stagger home. It was too late for dinner, too early for breakfast, but she’d promised him a several-hours-past-midnight snack when he’d offered to finish this job for his dad tonight.
The thought of fluffy pancakes and a mug of hot Earl Grey had him digging with renewed determination. At least the ground was still soft, the weather not quite chilly enough that the ground had frozen yet.
Bushes rustled nearby. Miles froze, shovel hovering in mid-air. After years of dealing with hauntings, he would love to say he had nerves of steel, but he’d long since learned one of the few consistent rules of the universe: cemeteries at night were creepy.
Everything about them was flawlessly designed to give you the heebie-jeebies. Gravestones and obelisks looming in the darkness? Creepy. Faint light from the crappy camping lantern Miles’s dad had gotten at a yard sale? Creepy. Being mostly submerged in a hole with only his head poking out to check if anyone was sneaking up on him? Super creepy.
He listened carefully, trying to peer through the gloom, but all he could make out were vague shadows and the few headstones within range of his lantern. No one would be working here this late—the caretaker left at six and the morning shift wasn’t due for hours.
It was probably a bird or a rabbit. Definitely not a zombie hauling itself from a nearby coffin to shamble over and eat his brains.
Miles firmly reminded himself that zombies didn’t exist. Ghosts, sure. Zombies, however, had never been proven. He knew that for a fact—he’d done a very thorough amount of research. A big part of the family business involved spending late nights all alone in cemeteries.
He made himself get back to digging. If anything came at him, it was going to get a shovel to the face.
Not many people realized caskets weren’t buried six feet down—at least, not more recent ones. It was usually closer to four, and while a couple feet less might not seem like much, it made a big difference when you were digging by yourself in the middle of the night. It also meant if a hypothetical zombie came lurching towards Miles, he could climb out of the hole fairly easily and run for his life.
At times like this, he really had to appreciate the little things.
His shovel thudded against something solid.
“Finally,” he muttered, reaching over to grab the lantern perched precariously on the lip of the open grave. As it swung, it sent shadows dancing across the dirt walls, swirling in a hellish kaleidoscope.
Miles dropped to his knees, digging with his bare hands to reveal the once-polished lid of the casket. He scraped and brushed debris away until the seam was visible, then grabbed his crowbar.
This was always the worst part: the stench that poured out when he first cracked a casket open.
Shuddering, Miles swallowed. Mrs. Mendoza had been buried for long enough now that she didn’t smell rotten, but an unmistakably sour, musty scent coated his mouth and tongue. Sure enough, when he managed to leverage the lid fully back, what was left of her body was leathery and withered, her lank hair spread across the silk pillow. Yellowed bone peeked out where her skin had stretched too tight and split, her hands clasped over the breast of the faded blue jacket she’d been buried in.
“Forgive me,” he told her quietly, “I’m just returning something that belongs to you.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the heavy golden locket, polished metal glinting in the weak light. It hummed against his skin, sparking with electricity from the vicious aura it gave off. Miles ground his teeth against the flood of rage and pain that washed over him. Poor Mrs. Mendoza.
In the casket, she sat up.
Miles’s brain screamed at him—a panicked jumble along the lines of holy shit, zombie, zombie, I knew it—before it caught up with what he was seeing.
Mrs. Mendoza wasn’t undead. Her spirit had decided to make an appearance. It was harder than usual to see the blurry edges of her form in the dim light, but if he focused through it, he could make out her corpse still lying prone and lifeless in her casket. Similar to peering through a film of condensation over a window.
“Ah, sorry.” He wasn’t sure if she could hear him, or how coherent she was, but saying nothing seemed impolite. “This is a little awkward, I’m here to—”
Mrs. Mendoza lunged forward and grabbed him by the throat. Instead of passing through him—which usually gave Miles the sensation of icy water dripping down his spine, raising goosebumps across every inch of his skin—an unmistakable pressure squeezed around his neck.
A black hole gaped as her mouth opened, letting out a low groan that sent hairs standing up all over Miles’s body as it echoed through the open grave. Overhead, trees shuddered in the wind.
Sometimes, getting the job done was as easy as a quick ritual to release a spirit or cleanse a possessed object. Sometimes, it required midnight gravedigging in a cemetery. And sometimes, Miles was unlucky enough that an angry spirit showed up to make things difficult when all he wanted was to go home, eat a mountain of pancakes, and go to sleep.
And Mrs. Mendoza was angry. She’d moved past the whole rattling dishes and slamming doors phase and moved straight into physical manifestation, a skill that required a lot of energy or a real rage high. And she’d decided that with great power, it was her great responsibility to strangle the life out of Miles.
“Come on… give me a break,” he ground out, sucking in ragged breaths around her relentless, ghostly grip. It wasn’t unbearably tight—despite being pissed off, she wasn’t quite that strong—but it was making things uncomfortable.
He reached down to grab the wrist of her corpse, gagging as the dried flesh gave way under his grip. No matter how many times he did it, he was never going to be okay with wrestling dusty old corpses—and those were the good jobs, where the bodies weren’t in the early stages of decomposition.
He should be used to it at this point. But reminding himself that this was just how his life was didn’t make him any less bitter when he was knee-deep in a casket, inhaling musty dead person air and trying not to get strangled by the ghost of a sixty-year-old woman with a murderous passion for gaudy jewelry.
The locket was still in his other hand, a living heart pulsing in response to Mrs. Mendoza’s presence.
“Thief,” she rasped, her voice a frigid wind that whipped around the hole. “Give it back.”
“Yeah, I’m trying.” The protection charms around Miles’s neck grew warm as they worked to repel Mrs. Mendoza’s aura. A maelstrom of negative emotions whirled around her, threatening to overtake him.
Miles pulled her corpse up by one skeletal wrist, far enough to slip the chain of the locket over her head.
A sound like dry leaves skittering across pavement blew around him. With a groan that Miles wanted to think sounded relieved, Mrs. Mendoza’s spirit fell back towards her corpse and vanished.
Coughing and shielding his face from the rising cloud of dust, Miles carefully adjusted the locket so it lay in the middle of her chest, nestled in the folds of her blue jacket. The evil aura that had saturated the cramped space slowly dissipated, fading away into the night air.
“Rest easy now,” he murmured, closing the casket gently. “Be at peace.”
Excerpted from The Hollow and the Haunted, copyright 2024 by Camilla Raines
