The Mean Ones

Midsommar meets The Final Girl Support Group in this horror novel about a woman who survived cult killings as a child and is striving to be ＂normal,＂ but a spontaneous trip into the woods and the voices in her head keep pulling her to the dark side.

So what if Sadie hears talking dead animals and a strange, comforting male voice in her head? The therapist insists these are just symptoms of PTSD. It makes sense considering that she hid under the bed and watched as her best friends were slaughtered.

But the murders were seventeen years ago, back when her name was Sabrina. Now, she’s Sadie: a perfectly normal 29-year-old. She works as a physical therapist assistant and lifts weights with her boyfriend, Lucas, who’s the sweetest, most considerate man--as long as he’s not angry. But when Lucas spontaneously agrees to join a couples trip to a cabin in the woods, the visions get worse, a strange figure stalks her during the night, and that male voice in Sadie’s head keeps calling, asking her to do things she’s never fathomed.

Sadie’s not sure if it’s her paranoia or something else entirely . . . But she is sure of one thing--this time, she’s not going to sit idly by as everything starts to unravel.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is a mixed-race Japanese American author of the YA horror novel, Such Lovely Skin. She has an MFA from The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She won the 2020 Diverse Worlds grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation and 2nd place in the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards for short fiction. When she’s not writing, she’s either gaming, lifting heavy weights, or teaching people how to lift heavy weights. She lives in Coralville, IA.