Read Every Heart a Doorway Online
Authors: Seanan McGuire
Every Heart a Doorway (16 page)
The juice was bitter on her lips. It tasted like heaven.
Nancy began walking down the path between the trees, never looking back. The door was gone long before she broke into a run. It wasn’t needed anymore. Like a key that finds its keyhole, Nancy was finally home.
Seanan McGuire
was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider bite.
Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the antivenin” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?” and can be amused for hours by almost anything. “Almost anything” includes swamps, long walks, long walks
in
swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using John Kenneth Muir’s
Horror Films of the 1980s
as a checklist.
Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that isn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant.
In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music. She is also a cartoonist and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical Web comic, “With Friends Like These…,” as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multihour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her Web site, and go to pretty much any movie with the word “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.
Seanan lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chain saws in daily life.
Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.” It probably doesn’t help that she has so many hobbies.
Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel
Feed
(as Mira Grant) was named as one of
Publishers Weekly
’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.
www.seananmcguire.com
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ALSO BY
SEANAN M
C
GUIRE
THE OCTOBER DAYE SERIES
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
A Red-Rose Chain
THE INCRYPTID SERIES
Discount Armageddon
Midnight Blue-Light Special
Half-Off Ragnarok
Pocket Apocalypse
Chaos Choreography
Sparrow Hill Road
AS MIRA GRANT
THE NEWSFLESH SERIES
Feed
Deadline
Blackout
THE PARASITOLOGY SERIES
Parasite
Symbiont
Chimera
Rolling in the Deep
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CONTENTS
2. Beautiful Boys and Glamorous Girls
Part II: With Your Looking-Glass Eyes
8. Her Skeleton, in Rainbows Clad
10. Be Still as Stone, and You May Live
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
EVERY HEART A DOORWAY
Copyright © 2016 by Seanan McGuire
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Fort
Photograph of forest © Colin Anderson/Getty Images; photograph of doorway © Martin Barraud/Getty Images
A
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Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8550-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8387-7 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9780765383877
First Edition: April 2016