So this week I’m reading the horror novel Seed by Ania Ahlborn. I got it for free from the Amazon Kindle lending library, which is kind of good, because I don’t like it very much; I don’t believe the characters, don’t care for the dialogue, and the excessive use of brand and pop culture references keeps making me feel like I’m reading a particularly weird article in an issue of “People” while waiting to get a haircut or something. I haven’t decided to put it down yet, but I have switched into “skim” mode. Anyway, here’s the teaser!

On a regular summer afternoon, while Jack sat slumped on the couch watching Scooby Doo on the cheap JVC, a rage slithered into his blood just as it had in the cemetery. Gilda was in the kitchen frying up cheap skirt steaks she’d picked up at the Thriftway.

Really, it’s all right to just call it a “television”. And there are other words besides “cheap” to describe something inexpensive. (If I had gone another sentence or two, “cheap” would have put in yet another appearance, this time in reference to vegetable oil; in its persistence, “cheap” is not unlike the demonic entity that follows Our Hero from Georgia to Louisiana.) Oh well. All I spent on it was the opportunity cost of using up my free book for August, so it’s okay.

Moving on, here are a couple of lines from the current page of The War of the Ravels:

She fished in her pocket, pulled out the little badge Arran Blackhawk had given her, showed it to Cynidece. “This is who I’m meeting.”
“You’re meeting a badge?”

Readers of Shards may recall a certain badge that an unofficial deputy displayed a little too proudly toward the end of the book; the badge mentioned here is, in fact, the same one as that. Like demonic entities and the word “cheap”, it gets around.