Holly Black: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown [Spotlight]

A wholly original story of rage and revenge, guilt and horror, love and loathing…

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is a wholly original story of rage and revenge, of guilt and horror, and of love and loathing from bestselling and acclaimed author Holly Black.

Buy The Coldest Girl in Coldtown from Amazon (affiliate link)

“An amazing YA vampire story (words not often said by yours truly) written with the to-be-expected Holly Black-vitality, that features an incredible female protagonist, a richly imagined world and an unexpectedly heart-stopping romance (no love triangles, thank gods, despite what the blurb slightly implies). With added grisly horror as a bonus.”—The Book Smugglers

“Holly Black has created a wonderful vampire world in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. Everyone loves a vampire — the darkness, the danger, the eternal youth, the power. The vampires of Coldtown realize that, and realize that they need blood, and realize that all they need to do is convince humans to enter the Coldtowns willingly.”—School Library Journal

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was originally a short story,” the author told Clarkesworld Magazine. “And I had some idea that what I was going to do in the novel was take the characters from the short story plus new characters and take them on an adventure. Great! I had a different idea for a different beginning where a girl woke up after a party where everyone was dead. But I thought I probably shouldn’t do that because it’s probably a noir-ish leftover from my Curse Worker days. I wrote three chapters with a different beginning, and then I realized, no, that the other beginning is the beginning and when I started writing it I really, really liked it…”

Holly Black introduces her novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Chris Well

Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.

https://chriswell.substack.com/
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