Genre:
Speculative Fiction
Themes:
Adventure / Survival
Amnesia
Fated Mates
Femme / Femme
Murder / Crime / Serial Killer
Mystery / Suspense
Mythology
Neurodiverse
Road Trip
Second Chance
Soulmates / Reincarnation
Supernatural Elements
Heat Level:
Sweet (kissing, holding hands, etc., but no other on-the-page physical intimacy)
Archetypes:
Adventurer / Explorer / World Traveler
Deity / Mythological
Ghost / Spirit
Geographic Location:
United States: Mountain States
Setting:
Desert
Hotel / Inn
Small Town / Rural
Sexual / Gender Identity:
Bi or Pansexual
Lesbian
Queer
to rule the desert
By Monica Robinson
A haunted desert, a roadtrip gone wrong, & an ultimate quest for revenge.
Quinn, a ghost of a woman who wanders the unending desert landscape, searches for a way to save herself from the truck driving highway (wo)man tasked with ferrying her to the land of the dead. She is the victim of an unsolved murder at a roadside motel, and has spent years roaming the desert and avoiding the dangerous creatures that lurk there, often unaware of the way these seemingly separate stories entwine with her own. After a perilous journey that brings new knowledge about the dangers of the desert and what is both buried and living there, as well as awakening old memories, which prove almost equally dangerous, Quinn arrives back at the site of her death to wait for her partner, Ava.
Quinn and Ava must evade capture and true death as they weave through the path toward a simple life together, but eventually discover that they are missing a few sentences from their collective narrative, a startling realization which threatens to break them entirely as they learn the unerring truth behind Quinn’s murder and the actions surrounding it.
This debut speculative fiction desert gothic novella from career poet Monica Robinson, thematically set along Route 40 in the American Southwest, loosely retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through a queer women’s lens. Ava and Quinn find themselves at odds with the strange specters that haunt the desert during a roadtrip-gone-wrong and must fight across the dangerous landscape to find one another again.