Seven years after Little Billy Bell disappears from the Iowa State Fair, Cat McCloud daydreams on an overgrown grave, oblivious to the perpetrator in her midst. Cat is a misfit with a black mark on her soul. She’s desperate to get high, get drunk, and get kissed. She has no time for made up lies or missing kids! When her sister whispers, “I know who took that missing boy,” Cat doesn’t believe her. Why believe the Queen of Secrets? Then her sister dies. Then more kids go missing, and Cat sleep-walks the neighborhood, haunted by the growing list of HAVE YOU SEEN ME’s. Master Storyteller Heidi Arneson's suburban gothic thriller probes the shadow side of Midwestern good intentions, uncovering a complex web of silence around several missing child cold cases.
About the Author:
Heidi Arneson is a Minneapolis-based writer, storyteller and visual artist. She’s written over 20 plays and performed her one-woman shows in the Twin Cities, New York, Chicago and California. Ms. Arneson is a Core Alumna of the Playwright’s Center, a recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship for Performance Art, a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, a Loft/Jerome Minnesota Writer’s Grant and three MicroGrants. Her workshops on transforming personal story into live performance have inspired many (including male inmates) to share their own stories as a way to heal, transform and connect. Interlocking Monsters is her first novel.
Author Quote:
“Shortly after the Jacob Wetterling abduction, someone ran up to me and whispered, ‘I know who took Jacob.’ I didn’t believe them, and it turned out to not be true, but that whisper haunted me for decades. For every child who goes missing, I thought, someone knows, someone sees. Compelled to write a work of fiction about the secrecy around pedophilia, I set Interlocking Monsters in a small Midwestern town, and told it through the eyes of a humorous, resilient teenage girl who fears there may be a perpetrator in her family. Truth-tellers (at best) risk being shunned by their communities, but the shamed silence around pedophilia must be broken, because that secrecy endangers the lives of innocents.” –Heidi Arneson
