"The Outside"

Laura Bickle’s fiction for adults and young adults includes The Hallowed Ones, Embers, and Sparks. Her newest release is The Outside, a young adult thriller that received a Kirkus starred review.

Bickle applied the Page 69 Test to The Outside and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Outside is the stubby end of a chapter. But it’s still pretty representative of the rest of the work:

it down. “Probably not. If gas was scavenged, then there’s probably nothing else left for us to use.”

The door swung open, and Horace whinnied. The hair rose up on the back of my neck.

“Alex, don’t!” I screamed.

Pale hands reached out of the darkness of the trailer and dragged him inside.

The Outside is the story of a young Amish woman, Katie, who’s been kicked out of her community to face the vampire apocalypse in the world beyond. These aren’t brooding, romantic vampires contemplating the states of their eternal souls - Katie’s monsters are Old World revenants, contagious and violent creatures who will stop at nothing to devour the living. They’ve chewed through everything in their path, leaving few survivors and very little hope for civilization.

In the scene leading up to this snippet, Katie and two of her friends have come upon an abandoned truck stop to scavenge for supplies. They’ve scraped what little food they can use from the convenience store and have advanced upon a tractor-trailer in the parking lot, thinking that there might be something there.

And there is, just not what they were hoping to find.

Learn more about the book and author at Laura Bickle's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Writers Read: Laura Bickle.

--Marshal Zeringue