Golden Guest:Taylor Grothe

Welcome to the last podcast of Thrill Quill- where I finish up my conversation about NORNAKONA with Golden Guest Taylor Grothe.

Taylor Grothe is a gothic and literary horror novelist. She is an Icelandic Saga and Arthuriana scholar with a degree from Duke University. She lives in southwestern Connecticut with her husband and two children.

NORNAKONA

99,800 words

Psychological, Gothic Horror

On Submission

Intent on a fresh start, Kathryn buys a one-way ticket to Iceland after her writing career and love life suffer simultaneous meltdowns. While cavorting with the locals and evading her landlady’s increasingly forceful requests for unpaid rent, she hears a rumor about a witch lurking nearby. At a forbidding hotel near an eerie, windblown lava field, Kathryn meets Anna.

Though struck by Anna’s beauty and intelligence, Kathryn is disconcerted by her aggressiveness—and her implication that they already know one another. Kathryn retreats to the nearby gift shop where Sigrún, the local herbalist, soothes her rattled nerves. Unfortunately, her contentment is short-lived. On a trip to a nearby beach, Kathryn witnesses the impossible: Anna raising corpses from the stormy Atlantic. Despite being terrified and repulsed, Kathryn is fascinated; she returns to determine the truth—and to see Sigrún again.

After waking injured in Sigrún’s apartment, Kathryn begins to suspect her relationship with the herbalist and Anna is more complicated than she understands. To disentangle herself and escape with her sanity, she must seek the truth, or suffer the mortal consequences of her ignorance— perhaps becoming one of the corpses in the water herself.

NORNAKONA is a 99,800-word queer psychological horror novel reminiscent of the uncanny, gothic backdrop in MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and the psychological trauma and pacing of MIDSOMMAR by Ari Aster.

Taylor Grothe taylor@taylorgrothe.com

Twitter/Instagram: @TaylorLGrothe

TaylorGrothe.com

Represented by: Elle Thompson at TriadaUS elle@triadaus.com

Triada US Literary Agency

PO Box 561 Sewickley, PA 15143