Dresden bares his soul in an exclusive excerpt from KEEPER OF THE BEES!
Meg Kassel‘s astoundingly original paranormal novel Black Bird of the Gallows followed one teen’s encounter with harbingers of death whose appearance meant very bad things for her town. The harbingers travel to where a tragedy is imminent and in Angie’s town, they’re going up against a beekeeper, aka a cursed paranormal entity that lives with deadly bees inside them.
Beekeepers may be the baddies in Black Bird of the Gallows, but Kassel’s follow-up Keeper of the Bees shedding a whole new light on the trials and tribulations of being one of the cursed beings.
The novel follows Dresden, a beekeeper who deeply regrets the terms of his cursed life and tries to only harm people who deserve it. Still, he wears the ever-changing faces of his victims with shame. When Dresden meets Essie, a girl whose experienced a sense of otherness thanks to strange hallucinations, she finds him fascinating rather than horrific. Could their connection be the secret to ending Dresden’s curse?
Check out an exclusive excerpt from Keeper of the Bees thanks to Entangled Teen, in which Dresden highlights his curse and his ancient existence.
Dresden. My name was once incredibly long, full of the bouncing consonants and rich vowels that came with life on the Mediterranean Sea. Somewhere over the years, most of it went missing, along with much of the rest of me.
Want more of the scoop on Dresden? Check out our exclusive interview with Meg Kassel!
Keeper of the Bees is out on September 4, 2018. You can pre-order it now via…
Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Indiebound | Kobo | Entangled Publishing
ABOUT THE BOOK
Dresden is cursed. His chest houses a hive of bees that he can’t stop from stinging people with psychosis-inducing venom. His face is a shifting montage of all the people who have died because of those stings. And he has been this way for centuries—since he was eighteen and magic flowed through his homeland, corrupting its people.
He follows harbingers of death, so at least his curse only affects those about to die anyway. But when he arrives in a Midwest town marked for death, he encounters Essie, a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from debilitating delusions and hallucinations. His bees want to sting her on sight. But Essie doesn’t see a monster when she looks at Dresden.
Essie is fascinated and delighted by his changing features. Risking his own life, he holds back his bees and spares her. What starts out as a simple act of mercy ends up unraveling Dresden’s solitary life and Essie’s tormented one. Their impossible romance might even be powerful enough to unravel a centuries-old curse.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Meg Kassel is an author of paranormal and speculative books for young adults. A New Jersey native, Meg graduated from Parson’s School of Design and worked as a graphic designer before becoming a writer. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter and is busy at work on her next novel. She is the 2016 RWA Golden Heart© winner in YA.
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