Carnival Creek

Nera Dickson started life as a mistake, was born with a grudge against society, and at age sixteen, lived with more than her share of black hoodies and Gen Z rebellion.

She embraced her existence in the same way she would embrace a lamppost when she ran into it because she was looking down at her phone.

She embraced it as a painful reality.

Sadly, most other people seemed to accept her existence in about the same way.

When her mother runs off with a new boyfriend, Nera is forced to live with her grandparents in a small town in rural Tennessee.

The name of the town is Carnival Creek, and it is home to a once-famous amusement park, now rusting, overgrown by nature, and forgotten by the outside world.

Carnival Creek is also home to Nera’s cousins, the Taylors. Nera soon discovers they are a family of gifted fiddle-players, and not because they love classical music. In fact, eighteen year old Juliet Taylor would sooner play the electric guitar and listen to punk rock. When Nera finds out why Juliet still plays the fiddle, she is pulled into a centuries-old conflict involving not only the Taylors, but her mother, herself, and all of Carnival Creek.

While Nera comes to terms with her mother’s abandonment and her newfound knowledge of her family’s history, Juliet struggles under the weight of a dark secret she refuses to share, even with her closest friends.

Loren Gregory—a boy, despite his name—is one of those friends. He moved to Carnival Creek from San Francisco four years previously with his adoptive parents. Like Nera, in many ways he is still trying to find his place in the small town. Shunned by some in the community because of his family’s non-traditional lifestyle, he thought he had finally found a best friend in Juliet Taylor.

But when the local cat lady utters an oddly specific prophecy that Juliet takes to be her destiny, lives and friendships are threatened, and the fabric of the town begins to fall apart.