Excerpt – Dear Hanna by Zoje Stage
Synopsis
Zoje Stage delivers another knockout with a blood-chilling follow-up to international sensation Baby Teeth, taking readers back into the unsteady world of a young sociopath who’s all grown up.
Hanna is no stranger to dark thoughts: as a young child, she tried to murder her own mother. But that was more than sixteen years ago. And extensive therapy—and writing letters to her younger brother—has since curbed those nasty tendencies.
Now twenty-four, Hanna is living an outwardly normal life of domestic content. Married to real estate agent Jacob, she’s also stepmother to his teenage daughter Joelle. They live in a beautiful home, and Hanna loves her career as a phlebotomist—a job perfectly suited to her occasional need to hurt people.
But when Joelle begins to change in ways that don’t suit Hanna’s purposes, her carefully planned existence threatens to come apart. With life slipping out of her control, Hanna reverts to old habits, determined to manipulate the events and people around her. And the only thing worse than a baby sociopath is a fully grown one.
With its dark humor and chillingly seductive protagonist, Dear Hanna is a stand-alone sequel sure to thrill returning and new readers alike.
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Excerpt
Dear Goose,
Wow. I don’t know what to say. I know you don’t want a lecture, but I would like to discourage you from aspiring to dickheadedness. You can be a genius without molesting anyone. You’re better than that. You don’t need to saddle your talent and ambition to wickedness. Please lil bro, I know you’re joking . . . but I also know that behind such jokes is a tiny bit of envy.
You’ve demonstrated the ability to discern right from wrong, and that means you can choose who you are and what you do—and I like to think that makes you inherently better than these dickheads from the near and distant past. They had small ideas about other people’s intrinsic worth. But really, to be so dismissive of others is to make yourself smaller, don’t you think? What sort of person needs to act that way—someone who’s cowardly and insecure, right? You’ve never struck me as someone who’s cowardly or insecure.
End of lecture.
You have this way of making me feel like I owe you something. And now I owe you something questionable from my own cobwebbed corner of reality—something I’ve only mentioned to you in cryptic passing. I’ll draw a quick sketch below, but here it is transcribed into words (as this image comes with a bit of history):
Sometimes I feel the presence of someone else inside me.
When I was little, I tried to turn the Other self into something like an imaginary friend. I gave it the name Marie-Anne Dufosset—which was pretty stupid on my part, because Marie-Anne was a real person who lived a long time ago (and was one of the last people burned as a witch). I found her on the internet while googling all sorts of stuff about witches. I couldn’t put it into words then, but I connected to Marie-Anne because she was obviously terribly misunderstood. So misunderstood they burned her to death!
Anyway, the Other presence inside me . . . it both isn’t me and is me. She is someone I don’t understand at all, and someone I have everything in common with. I love her more than anything and I despise her for being such a wicked little monster. She keeps me company and she makes me feel alone. She isn’t an “alternate” personality but her own separate being . . . who happens to live inside me. I am her house. She is the inhabitant of my body, the house.
Weird, right? She’s what makes me feel different, freakish . . . but also unique. When I was little I’d named it, but she doesn’t have a name. Or if she does, she doesn’t trust me with it, even after I’ve spent my whole life with her. Sometimes I feel her presence so strongly, a physical thing inside me—not unlike what a heavily pregnant woman must feel. But the being I house isn’t a child, and was never a baby. She is older than I am, though I am unsure of her exact age.
There are times when she feels like a stomachache, like something I ate that doesn’t agree with me. Other times it feels like a tumor, hard and bony, and every now and then she stretches up toward my throat. It’s hard to swallow then. I’ve rushed to the bathroom on more than one occasion, on the verge of vomiting or choking. And I’ve stood in front of the mirror and opened my mouth so my jaws felt ready to unhinge . . . and this is what I’ve drawn. Me with my mouth open. And fingertips emerging from the dark cave of my throat, followed by an eye. Sometimes I wish she would crawl out so we could speak face to face. I want to know her better, and I want to know her less. I want her at my side, and I want her to disappear. The best I can do is imagine on paper what she looks like—though I’m certain she’s a shape-shifter. And maybe I see her every day and don’t recognize her.
Yours,
Hanna
Text copyright © 2024 by Zoje Stage, Published by Thomas & Mercer
About the Author
Zoje Stage’s debut novel, Baby Teeth, was a USA Today and international bestseller and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. Her second “mind-bending” (New York Times) novel, Wonderland, was one of Book Riot’s Best Horror Books of 2020. Getaway, a “stunning…third triumph” (Booklist, starred review), was named by LitReactor as one of the Best Books of 2021. Her most recent novel, “utterly arrowing…masterful” (Criminal Element), is Mothered. She lives in Pittsburgh with her cats.
