About For No Mortal Creature: In this romantic, lush fantasy inspired by Wuthering Heights, a girl with the power to move between life and death must travel into the afterlife to save her grandmother. But to survive she’ll have to rely on her mortal enemy, as well as the ghost of the boy who once betrayed her. OUT NOW.

Love it or loathe it, the recent trailer for Emerald Fennel’s upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation definitely set tongues wagging. The film itself, which features Australian stars Margot Robbie as Cathy Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as the infamous Heathcliff, is described on IMDb as an exploration of the “intense and destructive relationship” between the two. Certainly the sneak peek seems to channel the wild, chaotic sensuality that churns unsettlingly beneath the surface of the original Brontë novel. However, critics of the casting have pointed out that choosing 35-year-old blonde Robbie to play what is canonically a dark-haired teenager, and Elordi to play what many scholars believe is a person of colour, is problematic. Regardless of personal opinion, the film, which is set to release in February 2026, will almost certainly be a loose and fast interpretation of the source material.

Wuthering Heights has long served as inspiration for other art forms, and books are no exception. For me, personally, the novel has shaped my own relationship with gothic and classic fiction over my lifetime. Its rawness, brutality, depictions of classism and racism, and portrayals of intergenerational trauma, left a deep impression on me as a teenager reading it for the very first time. And upon each re-read (and there have been many!) this work sinks its hooks into me even deeper – much like the lifelong obsession Heathcliff has for Cathy.

This is why, when it came to write my upcoming gothic Young Adult novel For No Mortal Creature, I used Wuthering Heights as one of my key inspirations.

If you’re like me, and you’re a little bit Wuthering Heights obsessed too, then here are some books to feed your addiction…

What Souls Are Made Of by Tasha Suri

This 2022 Young Adult retelling of Wuthering Heights is part of the Remixed Classics series, where authors from marginalised backgrounds reinterpret classic works through their own cultural lenses to subvert the overwhelming cishet, white, and male conventions of classic literature. In this retelling, Tasha Suri, an award-winning fantasy author, casts Heathcliff as the abandoned son of a lascar – an Indian sailor, which ironically is closer to canon than Jacob Elordi is. Catherine herself is reimagined as a British Indian teenager who is struggling with her own relationship between love and duty.

Ruthless Devotion by Rebecca Kenney

In this dark, spicy retelling of Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Heathcliff find each other in a small cult community. In this book, Cathy Earnshaw has a secret: she can sense death. And Heathcliff, who was stolen as a child and raised by necromancers, has secrets of his own. As the two embark on a romance at once violent and tender, they are forced to reckon with a community – and a world – that’s determined to keep them apart. Described as a Southern Gothic retelling with a magical, fantastical twist, this book is the third book in the Gilded Monsters series of interconnected standalones and sits firmly within the New Adult age category.

For No Mortal Creature by Keshe Chow

My own book, a gothic Young Adult novel that released on the 7^th of October, is set in a world where ghosts can die and become ghosts of ghosts – and no one knows how deep the afterlife truly goes. Jia Yi must delve through the many layers of the death realm in order to save her grandmother. In order to survive, she must rely on her two mortal (and immortal enemies): the ghost of Lin, the boy who once betrayed her; and the cold, aloof Essien Lancaster, prince of a rival kingdom. Brimming with romance, atmosphere, and Chinese superstitions, it’s like Inception crossed with Wuthering Heights, but with ghosts.

The Favorites by Layne Fargo

From the moors of Northern England to the ice rinks, this contemporary retelling of Wuthering Heights was released in January 2025 and immediately took the world by storm. This novel follows Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha as they navigate, as teens, the cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing, until a shocking incident at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games brings their partnership to an abrupt end. Set ten years after the fact, alternating between narrative text and clips from a fictional 2024 documentary, The Favorites transplants the savage, toxic love between Cathy and Heathcliff into a thoroughly modern setting.

Heathcliff by Karina Halle

While there aren’t many details about book, since it’s not due to come out until next year, it’s described as being a Gothic vampire romantasy retelling of Wuthering Heights; Halle suggests that Heathcliff himself will be portrayed in “all his broody glory”.

The post Five Wuthering Heights-Inspired Novels To Add To Your TBR appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Hello! Can you tell our readers about yourselves in one sentence?

Kimberly: I’m an Edgar Award nominated, USA Today bestselling author of thrillers and suspense novels with over one million copies sold worldwide.

Layne: I’m the Chicago-based bestselling author of The Favorites and other deliciously dramatic, unapologetically feminist books.

Cate: I started off writing about dead people, obituaries, in high school for the local paper and in some ways never stopped, which is why I now am a USA Today bestselling thriller author and screenwriter.

Vanessa: I’m a Cherokee author from rural Oklahoma, now living in the smallest state, writing bestselling thrillers while being closely managed by a pugapoo named Violet.  

Desperate Deadly Widows is the sequel to Young Rich Widows and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in three words, what would they be?

Kimberly: Funny, twisty & action-packed

Layne: Juicy, Glamorous, Empowering

Cate: Twisty, Fun, and Sexy

Vanessa: Campy, propulsive and yacht-y

What can readers expect?

Kimberly: The widows’ friendship is tested this go-around after the mayor’s death has the women scrambling to prove their innocence. Along the way, they’ll meet some charming new characters, but not everyone has their best intentions at heart. Someone is trying to take them down, and the widows will have to band together in order to survive.

Layne: Desperate Deadly Widows takes everything you loved about the first book and turns up the volume, so you can expect bigger, better adventures with our quartet of zany 80s ladies!

Cate: This novel has a lot of fun with the fabulously wealthy behaving badly, think Dynasty, while also looking into some of the real world consequences of the abuse of wealth and connections, particularly as it relates to minorities.

Vanessa: I love the opening hook (Mayor of Providence drops dead in the back of a strip club from poisoned champagne) because while it’s fiction, it’s not not something that could have happened in the 80s in Providence!

Where did the inspiration for Desperate Deadly Widows come from?

Layne: We know these characters so well now, a lot of the plot came from thinking about what would stress them out / force them to grow the most. Also, the whole point of this series is to have fun – and for people to have fun reading the book, first we had to have fun writing it!

Cate: We have really loved some of the books and movies pointing out the dangers of extreme wealth inequality and the rich and famous behaving badly. We were all Succession fans and White Lotus fans. So we wanted to bring that into this book in a very personal and Providence way.

Vanessa: I’ll add that there’s a plot around land rights and the Narragansett Indigenous community in Rhode Island that I really appreciated being about to share. We went to the Tomaquag Museum, which shares the culture and history of the tribes of Southern New England, and interviewed the Executive Director, Loren Spears. We developed a lawyer character to tackle these questions (and maybe as a love interest!), and we also incorporated a real issue in Providence when our downtown mall was built on a Narragansett burial ground. I find real life issues to be the biggest inspiration.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

Kimberly: I loved getting to give my character Camille a love interest in Aiden. He’s exactly the kind of man she wouldn’t choose to fall far–smart but not slick, successful but not rolling in cash–and at first he seems immune to her charms. Their push-pull as the story evolves was a real joy to write.

Layne: My character Meredith is now the owner of the strip club where she was a dancer in book one, and it was really interesting to explore the challenges she faces being taken seriously as a businesswoman (though a bit depressing how little has changed from the 1980s to now…).

Cate: I loved writing the scenes with Justine where she has to learn how her identity is being used and, in many respects, weaponized by others. She has to recognize not just how she sees herself but how others see her, and really learn not to assume money, attractiveness and connections means good character.

Vanessa: I like the idea of what happens when you start getting what you want, mo money, mo problems, if you will. For the widows, especially Krystle who I write, she starts to get money, access to power and prestigious clients. But that comes with slippery morals and big conflict.

With four of you working on the novel, what’s the process like?

Layne: We kept basically the same process from the first book (which Cate explains in detail below), though this time we were able to meet up in person and do some IRL research, rather than googling everything like we did when writing Young Rich Widows in the depths of COVID lockdown. Think yachts, Newport mansions, and more!

Cate: We spend weeks plotting the novel and giving ourselves a roadmap of what challenges the characters will face and how those challenges will change them throughout the course of the story. Then we decide whose POV is best to tell certain stories and convey certain reveals. After that, we outline. Then we write, each taking out POV character. Every week, we go through each other’s chapters for consistency and continuity, as well as tweak the language of our individual POV characters in the chapters to make sure the “owner” of that character feels that their actions and words dovetail with who they are and their motivations. As we write, the characters sometimes take us to different places, so then we go back – usually around the midpoint – and have another intensive re-plotting/redrafting session, and we adjust the prior chapters accordingly.

What’s next for you all?

Kimberly: My solo book, The Expat Affair, publishes June 3rd from Park Row Books, and I’m already busy writing my next. And of course, there’s an exciting new adventure for the widows coming in book 3.

Layne: I’m working on a follow-up to my ice dance drama The Favorites for Random House. Desperate Deadly Widows will be my last Widows adventure, but Kim, Cate, and Vanessa are already hard at work on more totally tubular installments in the series!

Cate: I have my solo book, The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold, coming out on September 23rd from Thomas & Mercer. And we have the third book in the Widows series.

Vanessa: I started a new series focusing on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (the first was Blood Sisters) and the second book is out October 28th, called The Bone Thief, which is set in Rhode Island and delves into the past of the Narragansett tribe we feature in Desperate Deadly Widows.

Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?

Kimberly: I can’t wait to dive into Julie Clark’s The Ghostwriter – and I’ll be hanging with her on June 4th at Poisoned Pen. I’m also really looking forward to Chevy Stevens’ The Hitchhiker, out later this year.

Layne: I recently read an ARC of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, which shares a release date with the Desperate Deadly Widows paperback, and I’ll never be able to fly again without thinking of Folk’s unhinged heroine Linda. Later in 2025, I’m also looking forward to August Lane by Regina Black, Play Nice by Rachel Harrison, and of course Taylor Jenkins Reid’s next book Atmosphere.

Cate: I am very excited for Vanessa’s second installment of Blood Sisters, The Bone Thief. And I’m looking forward to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s upcoming Atmosphere, which is set in the 80s like our books.

Vanessa: I’ll share something only slightly self-serving I just learned: my next book, The Bone Thief, is being released on October 28th along with two other Cherokee authors’ books, The Devil is a Southpaw, by Brandon Hobson and To the Moon and Back, by debut Eliana Ramage. So we’re calling it Read a Cherokee author day LOL

Will you be picking up Desperate Deadly Widows? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A With The Authors Behind ‘Desperate Deadly Widows’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

In these stories, dear student, retribution visits a lothario lecturer; the sinister truth is revealed about a missing professor; a forsaken lover uses a séance for revenge; an obsession blooms about a possible illicit affair; two graduates exhume the secrets of a reclusive scholar; horrors are uncovered in an obscure academic department; five hopeful initiates must complete a murderous task and much more!

In These Hallowed Halls is a brand-new stories from Olivie Blake, M.L. Rio, David Bell, Susie Yang, Layne Fargo, J.T. Ellison, James Tate Hill, Kelly Andrew, Phoebe Wynne, Kate Weinberg, Helen Grant, and Tori Bovalino.

INTRODUCTION
Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane

Dark Academia.

What do those words conjure up for you? Mysterious and dangerous occurrences in various seats of learning? Students, and sometimes their tutors, in peril? Murder? Magic? Ghosts? Dusty books in old libraries? Clandestine cults and secret societies devoted to ancient rituals? All or none of the above?

If you’re new to the subject, you’ve picked the perfect place to start. If you’re already a fan, then we think you’re going to love what we’ve got in store for you within these pages! In the last few years the phenomenon of Dark Academia has, quite literally, exploded. Fuelled by book clubs on social media platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, where people discuss classic and Gothic books, this wave developed into a subculture in its own right that grew even more popular during the pandemic and lockdowns. Let’s face it, there wasn’t much else to do during those times than watch things and read.

Books like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the Harry Potter series and classics such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the ghost stories of M. R. James have all been credited as inspiring the trend, as well as films like Love Story, Dead Poets Society and Cruel Intentions, not to mention more recent TV shows like A Discovery of Witches (based on the excellent novels by Deborah Harkness), A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Queen’s Gambit, which all helped to fan the flames.

So, you can imagine our delight when we were asked to edit this anthology and gather together some of the finest exponents of this type of fiction around. Author of The Atlas Six and The Atlas Paradox, Olivie Blake, brings you a timely and unique social commentary – which still connects to the past – in her story “Pythia”, while M. L. Rio (If We Were Villains) reminds us of the pitfalls and potential benefits of being in the wrong place at the right time – or perhaps that should be the right place at the wrong time? – in “Weekend at Bertie’s”.
The author who brought you novels such as Good Girls Lie and Her Dark Lies, J. T. Ellison, and Tori Bovalino – who wrote The Devil Makes Three and Not Good for Maidens – show us the real dark side of Dark Academia in “X House” and “Phobos” respectively. Whereas Helen Grant (Ghost and Too Near the Dead), Layne Fargo (Temper and They Never Learn) and Kelly Andrew (The Whispering Dark) introduce us to the disturbing strangeness of the subject in “The Professor of Ontography”, “The Ravages” and “The Hare and the Hound”.
Both Kate Weinberg and James Tate Hill return us to the worlds of their books (The Truants, and Blind Man’s Buff, Academy Gothic) in their stories “1000 Ships” and “Sabbatical”. Author of Kill All Your Darlings and The Finalists, David Bell, presents us with a thought-provoking tale, “Four Funerals”, that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading it, as will Phoebe Wynne’s (Madam, The Ruins) story “Playing” and its intriguing insights. All this plus Susie Yang (White Ivy) and her meditation on relationships, secrets and longing, “The Unknowable Pleasures”.

Excellent contributions by authors writing at the top of their game, showing the full range and power of what Dark Academia can do. So, settle back in your favourite reading spot with your favourite tipple, preferably surrounded by books, and let the lessons begin!

Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane
February 2023

The post Read The Introduction To ‘In These Hallowed Halls’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

This July, there are a lot of exciting debut releases and in today’s post, we’re featuring a selection of our most anticipated to read! From a cute contemporary and enchanting fantasy, to thrilling mysteries and horror, we got ‘em here!

The Beckoning Shadow by Katharyn Blair
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A heart-stopping fantasy novel about a teenage runaway who enters a dangerous tournament with an impossible prize.

The Marriage Clock by Zara Raheem
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A debut release from Muslim author, Zara Reheem, featuring a young, Muslim-American woman who is given three months to find the right husband or else her traditional Indian parents will find one for her.

The Million Pieces of Neena Gill by Emma Smith-Barton
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A story of good girl gone bad. When her brother left her and everything in her life seems to be falling apart, Neena is about to find out that only love can piece you back together.

The Spaces Between Us by Stacia Tolman
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Two outcast best friends are desperate to survive senior year and break away from their rural factory town.

Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A determined young woman sets out to rescue her kidnapped girlfriend by stealing a dragon from the corrupt emperor in this stunning fantasy from debut author Rebecca Kim Wells.

The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A gritty YA fantasy about a young chieftain from a persecuted caste of mercy-killers who must rely on her wits and bone magic to smuggle the crown prince to safety.

The Phantom Forest by Liz Kerin
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

After being chosen for her village’s human sacrifice ritual, Seycia is transported to the Underworld and must join forces with Haben, the demon to whom she was sacrificed, to protect the family she left behind from beyond the grave. A story about love, survival, and what it means to be human.

The Storm Crow by Kalyn Josephson
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Two sisters are planning for revenge and igniting rebellion to take back the magical elemental crows that were taken from their people.

The Best Lies by Sarah Lyu
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Told in alternating timelines, Thelma and Louise meets Gone Girl in this twisted psychological thriller about the dark side of obsessive friendship.

The Blue Period by Luke Jerod Kummer
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A riveting novel about the tragic romance that nearly destroyed a young Pablo Picasso—while granting him his first flight of creative genius.

Temper by Layne Fargo
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

A razor-sharp page-turner thriller story about female ambition and what happens when fake violence draws real blood…

Wilder Girls by Rory Power
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

In this thrilling YA horror from debut author Rory Power, comes a story about survival and the power of female friendships.

Will you be checking out any of these debut authors? Tell us in the comments below!

The post 12 Debut Authors To Check Out In July 2019 appeared first on The Nerd Daily.