In Thrall , a young woman looking for a transformative college experience is bitten by a vampire and must team up with his other living victims to hunt him down. Lucy Easting has at last broken free from her grim home life and is ready to truly live. But her long-awaited new beginning at Rollins University isn’t what she expected. After attending the first campus party of the year, Lucy awakens the next day with a memory block… and two puncture marks on her neck . She tries to piece together what happened that night, but every lead brings her to another dead end. Until she receives a handwritten note from the campus radio station, inviting her to call. When she does, the host’s soothing voice over the line confirms her worst fear, and the simplest explanation of what’s happening to her: she’s turning into a vampire. Lucy teams up with the show’s host, who narrowly escaped an attack her sophomore year, and a beautiful archery champion who, while exactly Lucy’s type, is as likely to shoot her as kiss her. They believe their “friend with the cold hands” is responsible for the disappearance of several women in town, and they’ve been tracking him via the airwaves since long before Lucy arrived. As the vampire’s sway over Lucy grows and his plans become clear, she realizes she must fight for a future of her own, or she may not have any future at all. “ Thrall has all the beloved dread and darkness of classic vampire tales, but also breathes life into the undead genre with a fresh and fast-paced journey of empowerment. You haven’t read a vampire story like this before.” —Kylie Lee Baker, The Sunday Times bestselling author of Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng "A modern-day riff on Dracula that takes on the monsters that hunt at the margins of society and the people who enable them. Thrall is an exciting ride with a strong cast of women you’d bleed for.” —Trang Thanh Tran, New York Times bestselling author of She Is a Haunting "Mahoney's book takes a moment of women’s terror—being unable to remember what exactly happened at a party—and forms it into a dark adventure about how your life can be devoured by a moment. A lovely, spooky story of fighting back, claiming your own life, and battling vampires." —Leslie J. Anderson, author of The Unmothers “An urgent and thrilling story about how we all have to fight to become our fulsome, authentic, independent selves.”—Juliet Landau, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Bosch, Bosch: Legacy, A Place Among the Dead Rebecca Mahoney is the author of the young adult contemporary fantasies The Valley and the Flood and The Memory Eater , as well as the co-creator of independent audio drama The Bridge. Rebecca is a strong believer in the cathartic power of all things fantastical and frightening, and she loves writing about the care and feeding of the monsters in all of us. Her work has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly - in addition, The Valley and the Flood was a Must-Read Title for the 2021 Massachusetts Book Award, and The Memory Eater was a finalist for the New England Book Award. TRANSCRIPT OF ROLLINS UNIVERSITY STUDENT RADIO STATION WVBS (“PALLAS RADIO”) Broadcast number: Not yet assigned UNKNOWN SPEAKER: My mother always said I’d get eaten alive, out here in the world. Of course, every time she said it, ‘the world’ meant a different thing. The bus stop. The crosswalk. College, eventually. When I was little, I always thought reassuring her was just a matter of proving that I was capable of navigating the wicked snares of the grocery store parking lot. But what my mother was holding onto was deeper, like it so often is. What she was afraid of was never bus stops, or crosswalks, or campuses. To her, they were all the same: a lottery wheel, always turning. And every time she or I left the house, it turned again and again. I was never afraid of the wheel. Maybe it was the fact that she’d raised me in a layer of bubble wrap, but I’ve always found it romantic that there’s no real life without chance. And if all the terrible things waiting for me – in the grocery store, at the crosswalk, or here, on our campus – if all of them came down to bad luck, then that was more comforting than scary. There’s no real malice in that. Whatever could happen to me, it would never be personal. I tried to tell her that, once. But that was never how she saw it. To her, the wheel had intention. It had teeth. Maybe you’re thinking, bet you wish you’d listened to her now. But I think we were both right. There was something waiting for me, out here in the world. It was by chance. It wasn’t my fault. And it was never personal. But it had teeth all the same. *** Lucy Easting, once again, took a slightly incorrect step. Her new roommate hadn’t yet requested that Lucy avoid every one of the particularly noisy floorboards in their ancient dorm room. But judging by the way she arched her shoulders like an unhappy cat, i