An island oasis turns deadly when a terrifying legend threatens to kill off visitors one by one…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Sacrifice, a haunting new novel from Rin Chupeco, author of the Bone Witch trilogy—available September 27th from Sourcebooks Fire.
Gods might have made people in their image, but when the gods themselves are unmitigated bastards with their own hidden agendas, then no one is truly safe. I grew up with both the threat of hellfire and damnation due to my Catholic upbringing in a majority Catholic country, yet still practiced Buddhism alongside it due in part to Asian parents, where it was taught that the worthiest of saints can ascend to the heavens with something very much like godhood, and where the gods too, can be fickle and contrary. The contradiction has always remained a source of fascination for me, and the idea of flawed gods, how not even beliefs are not always set in stone, have heavily influenced how I write my stories.
The world, we’re always told, will last longer than we will ever do. Once the last human takes their final breath, Earth will still continue to flourish for millennia more, until the sun dies out millions of years from now. While life is fleeting, existence can take eons.
But sometimes nature isn’t willing to wait that long. Sometimes nature looks at us as how we sometimes act: as parasites that drain resources and contribute nothing back to the world, compromising its ability to endure longer. While real-life nature doesn’t possess the actual sentience to try and wipe us from the planet, it can still feel that way sometimes. But that’s what fiction is for. There’s a lot of books that posit the what-ifs of a nature that is actively trying to kill us, and these are five of my favorites.
