Man Made Monsters

Summary

Tsalagi should never have to live on human blood, but sometimes things just happen to sixteen-year-old girls.

Making her YA debut, Cherokee writer Andrea L. Rogers takes her place as one of the most striking voices of the horror renaissance that has swept the last decade. Horror fans will get their thrills in this collection—from werewolves to vampires to zombies—all the time-worn horror baddies are there. But so are predators of a distinctly American variety: the horrors of empire, of intimate partner violence, of dispossession. And so too the monsters of Rogers’ imagination, that draw upon long-told Cherokee stories, of Deer Woman, fantastical sea creatures, and more.

Following one extended Cherokee family across the centuries, from the tribe’s homelands in Georgia in the 1830s to World War I, the Vietnam War, our own present, and well into the future, each story delivers a slice of a particular time period that will leave readers longing for more.

When Jeska's grandmother accidentally calls her by a stranger's name, she seizes her first clue to uncovering her family's past and hopefully to all that's gone unsaid. With the help of an old family photo album, her father's encyclopedia collection, and the unquestioning friendship of a stray cat, the silence begins to melt into frightening clarity: Jeska's family survived a terror that they've worked hard to keep secret all her life. And somehow, it has both nothing and everything to do with her, all at once.

A true story of navigating generational trauma as a child, “I'll Keep You Close” is about what comes after disaster: how survivors move forward, what they bring with them when they do, and the promise of beginning again while always keeping the past close.

Man Made Monsters is a masterful, heartfelt, haunting collection ripe for crossover appeal. Just don’t blame us if you start hearing things that go bump in the night.