Stalker: a Gothic Thriller... seeking advance readers/reviewers :)

STALKER
A Gothic Thriller from Pauline West

​“It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.”
- Oscar Wilde

Years ago, you asked me how I came to be a loner.  Traveling on a wolf’s passport, you called it.   
      I laughed.  I think I said, “I’m gonna go with response ‘A.’”
    “That’s A for ‘Ask me tomorrow, right?’”  
You knew all my jokes.  We’d worked together a long time.  
      But the truth has blood on it.  I couldn’t tell it to you then.  If these pages have found you now, there is no longer anyone alive they can hurt.  

    The night I met Death, he thought he was just passing through...  
                                                                 
        +++    +++   +++   +++    +++    +++   +++   +++    +++    +++   +++   +++    +++    +++     

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So recently we had this delicious spell of stormy mornings, and I found myself nostalgic, for some Bizarro reason, for small-town Kansas and her lovely, lonely old Victorian wheatfield hotels... so I wrote a story.  

Interested in being an early reader in exchange for your honest review?  Send me an email at mygoodnesspauline @ gmail dot com and tell me how much you love bloody fairytales :)  

I'm gonna try some new stuff with this one.  I'm all atwitterpated with nerves/terror, but I think I'm gonna try reading it for Youtube... this one is so fucking fun to read aloud, and if there's anything I've learned from all my misadventures, it's that you just gotta keep throwing yourself out there.

There's lots of snarks waving around their pitchforks & sharpened sticks, but also some lovely Other Witches, and how else can we find each other, if not by all of us flailing, shaky-winged, out into the empty air?
 

P.S...

​It was a lifelong dream of mine to hole up for a month or at the Savoy Hotel back home in Kansas City, but, alas, the place burned down.  Harry Truman used to eat his boiled egg breakfasts there...and dad used to take us on special occasions for lobster bisque and shrimp cocktails.  
Gleaming silver and dark, thick-paneled wood, tinkly ice, old-fashioned waiters.  Worn red velvet carpet, slippery leather booths.  I loved that place intensely.  Curses.

However, I held the below images in mind as I wrote, and you can also check out my Pinterest (guilty habit!) moodboard for it here.   
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Man, to write awhile in an old, falling apart, stuck-in-the past hotel, wouldn't that be heaven...!
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Giacomo Bulleri seated in the bar area of his Giacomo Bistrot. Credit Bert Teunissen

Bulleri’s fabled Ristorante da Giacomo, designed by Renzo Mongiardino in 1989, evokes an early 20th-century Lombard trattoria. Credit Bert Teunissen

Dane Dehaan for Vanity Fair, 2015. I <3 hooded eyes.