Another Little Piece by Kate Karyus Quinn

Amazon | Goodreads

The spine-tingling horror of Stephen King meets an eerie mystery worthy of Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series in Kate Karyus Quinn's haunting debut.

On a cool autumn night, Annaliese Rose Gordon stumbled out of the woods and into a high school party. She was screaming. Drenched in blood. Then she vanished.

A year later, Annaliese is found wandering down a road hundreds of miles away. She doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know how she got there. She only knows one thing: She is not the real Annaliese Rose Gordon.

Now Annaliese is haunted by strange visions and broken memories. Memories of a reckless, desperate wish . . . a bloody razor . . . and the faces of other girls who disappeared. Piece by piece, Annaliese's fractured memories come together to reveal a violent, endless cycle that she will never escape—unless she can unlock the twisted secrets of her past.

Whoa. I started out thinking that this was going to be a realistic YA thriller/suspense novel, but I certainly wasn't expecting all of the bat-shit crazy that this plot-line dished out - and the literalness of ripping out peoples hearts and eating them...totally gross!

Mmmm....tasty!

But still, I could NOT put this book down. The mystery of how the being inhabiting Annaliese's body came to be, and why she/it moved from body to body was just so intriguing that I had to keep reading. Plus, I actually came to like her/it, since she/it didn't seem all that bad...she actually started to care about Annaliese's parents, and found herself falling in love with her neighbor, Dex. That doesn't sound like something evil, now does it? The author did a great job of making a character that should normally have been feared come off as really like-able.

After finishing this book, I can definitely see why it was described as having a Stephen King-like quality to it, and I can't wait to see what Ms. Quinn comes up with next! This was a pretty cool debut novel, and I loved the way that each chapter began with a poem that had been written by the real Annaliese, while the chapters themselves were told in the POV of Anna, who had taken over her body - the juxtaposition of the poems with the contents of the chapters was quite eerie (and the poems themselves were really good!). 

According to Goodreads, this author has another book coming out next June called (Don't You) Forget About Me - and it's also a spooky mystery! I'm already diggin' the Simple Minds homage, so now I just have to wait until I can get my hands on a copy. Another author added to my insta-buy list, simply for having great ideas and a real knack for telling stories. I highly recommend you give this novel a try, especially if you're in the mood for something creepy to read around Halloween!