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The Chilling Simple Zana Previti |
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Synopsis:
Young Nora Pirrip has lost her entire family to a mysterious
plague-like illness. After her recovery, while searching for
answers she forms a close bond with a secretive doctor and those
who work in his household. As these relationships grow closer,
village mysteries begin to unravel. Who is stealing bodies from
the village graveyard? How did the blacksmith die? What happened
to the midwife’s sister? Where did Nora’s mother go, all those
years she was missing? What is going on in the big house on the
hill? The stories of the other Chilling families and inhabitants
intersect with Nora’s search for the meaning of and the answers
about her family’s deaths. Eventually, Nora’s quest disrupts all
those around her. "...Previti's first novel is a lyrical
contemplation of the circle of life and the immutability of
human nature
ISBN: 978-1-60489-213-7 Hardcover $17.00 Sale $8.50 ISBN: 978-1-60489-212-9 Trade paper $10.00 Sale $5.00 318 Pages |
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About
the Author: Zana Previti was born and raised in New England. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. Her work has been published in the New England Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, the American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Poetry International's 2014 C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona. She is the author of the chapbook Providence (Finishing Line Press, 2017).
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| Excerpt from the novel: |
This is the village Chilling.
It’s 1791. Thereabouts. Certainly not 1800, not yet. The
ground is mud, because it is springtime, and the sky is
dark, because it is nighttime. There have been problems
in this village, recently. Men and women, merely days or
hours dead, have been dug up—pulled, yanked, heaved,
hoed—from their soft black soil beds. Their bodies have
been dragged, their feet splayed, and the toes traced
twin trenches past Smart Hale and Beddine Hale Asleep in
the Lord, past James and Cotton Turner Eternal Rest,
past the gravediggers’ shed and into the pebbly road.
It
is a mist-laden, yawning New England springtime. The
season is combing its hair, wiping the fog from the
mirror and staring into its eyes. The world is beginning
again.
Now, this very moment, in Chilling:
A
newly-dead body is being carried from the graveyard. The
body wears no shoes. The longest toe of the dead foot is
not the first “big toe,” at all, but the slim elegant
mid-toe, the index toe, the toe we would use to point
out our bodysnatchers should we ever, through loss of
our hands or voice, be relegated to pointing with our
toes. Three toes, the littlest ones, have curled into
the foot like a claw; their nails are greenish and black
at the cuticle. The grime underneath each nail is hard
like shale.
Though it is 1791, and though Chilling is a
barely-existent coastal village, these dead toes are
exactly like all dead toes. They are like your toes.
They are like the dead toes of emperors and scientists
and prophets. They are turning gray. They have lost
their agency. They fall together like exhausted soldiers
in a trench, leaning and lolling against one another. In
their collapse they collide and bear the weight of the
others. They cannot feel discomfort. They are neither
cold nor wet. Death has made them impervious, stoic,
capable beyond measure. |
