by Alyne De Winter (Author)
Your Shadow Follows You Everywhere..... From the moment she enters the world of her new boarding school, Blight's Academy, teenage sleuth, Poppy Farrell, finds danger. From a strange encounter on a train platform, to evidence of a murdered student in the woods that surround the ancient, gothic buildings, life at Blight's Academy grows more menacing by the day. Poppy and her friends, Clair and Georgie, must outwit their Shadows, older girls assigned to mentor them, but who coldly follow them wherever they go, like their shadows. There is a dark secret at the heart of Blight's Academy: disappearances, deaths, and conspiracies pervade the wooded grounds, flicker in the stained glass windows, tinkle like a music box lullaby through the turreted halls. Enter the world of The Shadows where witchcraft is afoot. Young Adult or Old Adult, this story is guaranteed to send a shiver up your spine and keep you turning the pages far into the night.
Author Biography
Author Bio: Alyne de Winter is an author of Gothic Mysteries and Occult Thrillers featuring tormented beauties, eerie settings, night religions, secret histories... Under the influence of Grimm, she wrote her first story at eight years old. After years of drawing and painting, by a fluke ended up as an English major. She wrote and published award-winning poetry but always wanted to write fiction. The stories did not come to her until she went to Europe, then they flooded in and still haven't stopped. She loves the tradition of the writer establishing themselves with short stories while building the novels, so you will find many short stories on her Amazon page. The short story requires intensity of focus, economy of language (so every word must be effective) and must keep the plot lines tight. She likes to think of the short story as poetry's second cousin.
Major influences: Grimms' Fairy Tales, Complete Works of Shakespeare, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Daphne du Maurier, Charles Dickins, Anne Rice, Theophile Gautier, Edgar Allen Poe, the films of Barbara Steele and other 1960s horror films. (Not a gore fan) Religion, History, costume, ancient dance and folk cultures, and witchcraft. The Gothic novel has always been a love letter to the past, a grieving for lost beauty and an elegy to the soul.