Guest Post with Laura Bickle (Author of “The Hallowed Ones”)

Title: The Hallowed Ones
Author: Laura Bickle
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Release Date: September 25, 2012
Pages: 320
Pre-Order Here: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Book Depository
Brought To You By: Bewitching Book Tours

If your home was the last safe place on earth, would you let a stranger in?
In this captivating thriller, an Amish settlement is the last safe haven in a world plagued by an unspeakable horror…
Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenagers are free to experience non-Amish culture before officially joining the church. But before Rumspringa arrives, Katie’s safe world starts to crumble. It begins with a fiery helicopter crash in the cornfields, followed by rumors of massive unrest and the disappearance of huge numbers of people all over the world. Something is out there...and it is making a killing.
Unsure why they haven’t yet been attacked, the Amish Elders make a decree: No one goes outside their community, and no one is allowed in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man lying just outside the boundary of their land, she can’t leave him to die. She refuses to submit to the Elder’s rule and secretly brings the stranger into her community—but what else is she bringing in with him?

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Gossip Birds
By Laura Bickle
It’s very difficult to keep anything hidden from a raven.

A small clan of ravens lives in my neighborhood, and they are fascinating to watch. They usually come to the maple tree in my front yard in pairs, checking to see what treats they might be able to find. Very clever birds, they know where the dish of cat food is for the neighborhood tomcat, and they will pick it clean if they locate it before he does. It doesn’t matter how often I move it…they find it.

And they can be quite ruthless. A pair of robins had made a nest in a redbud tree in the backyard not too long ago. It was a very well-hidden nest…it had taken me a few weeks to find it myself. Last week, I heard a terrible squawking and fight. By the time I made it out the back door to intervene, a raven was flying away with a blue robin’s egg in its beak.

Alas, the robins gave up. I know that the raven was watching to find the other eggs, even though I tried to be vigilant about brandishing the garden hose. The nest is now empty, and the robins have moved on. But the ravens are still about.

They have their own language, and I have heard them referred to as “gossip birds.” They carry on long conversations in their hoarse, rasping voices. Like parrots, they can be taught to speak human words, though they do so with an unforgettable rasp and pitch. Ravens can use tools and possess excellent memories. There are many stories of flocks of ravens who are driven away from fields forever with a single shot. And when I say forever, I mean generations…if a raven is killed at a site, its fellows will discuss this amongst themselves and warn the young ravens.

In mythology, ravens have been tied to Odin, the king of the Norse gods. He had two who acted as his personal messengers – Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory). Odin would send these birds out into the world to gather intelligence. “Gossip birds,” indeed.

When I was creating the world of THE HALLOWED ONES, ravens were on my mind. The heroine, Katie, is an Amish girl who is very in tune with the natural world. Ravens are part of her landscape, picking through fields for grain and standing on her clothesline, gossiping with each other. When the end of the world comes, the humans are not sure what’s happened. The people in Katie’s settlement only know that there are no cars on the road, that a curfew has been ordered. There are no lights on the horizon.
But the birds know.

One morning, Katie awakens to a great cacophony. Thousands of ravens are calling to each other, taking wing in a massive swarm. The swarm is so dense that it blackens the sky, and the sound is deafening. The birds are leaving, flying south in vast multitudes.

The evacuation of the birds tells Katie that something is very wrong with her world, something truly horrific. She can only guess at what it is…but the ravens already know, and are shrieking to anything that will listen.
Laura Bickle has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She and her chief muse live in the Midwest, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats.
Her work has been published in Midnight Times, Down in the Cellar, MicroHorror, Theaker's Quarterly Fiction,Ballista , Byzarium, New Myths,a Blog-O-Novella office soap opera for True Office Confessions, and Aoife's Kiss. Her most recent project is the Embers series of urban fantasy novels for Juno-Pocket Books.

Find Laura Here: Goodreads|Facebook|Twitter|Website