Spotlight & Giveaway: DATING & DISMEMBERMENT by A.L. Brody

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome romance author A.L. Brody to HJ!

Hi A.L. Brody and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, DATING & DISMEMBERMENT!

Thank you for having me, you monstrously delightful readers!
 

Please summarize the book a la Twitter style for the readers here:

If Emily Henry and Grady Hendrix had a book baby, and that baby grew up watching Beetlejuice, you’d have DATING & DISMEMBERMENT. It’s an enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy about two legendary monsters fighting over the right to haunt a summer camp, only to realize that the couple that slays together, stays together.
 

Please share the opening lines of this book:

Darla Drake, aka the Duchess of Death, aka the Creature of Clear Creek, and one of the most feared monsters on the planet, stood over her soon-to-be victim, a cruel camp counselor named Kyle Browning, and prepared to turn him into either a Lego set or paste, depending on what kind of mood she was in. Darla raised her weapon of choice, the infamous bronze scourge that had been passed down to her from her mother, and right as she was about to render justice unto this unfortunate soul, Darla stopped. She stood there, arm raised, scourge rattling in the wind, as
Kyle covered his eyes as though playing a baby game where if he couldn’t see her, she didn’t exist.
But Darla did exist. And yet, her hand stayed. Come on, she thought. This is not the time to have an
existential crisis.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I loved the idea of exploring the personal lives of these deadly monsters. What did they do when they weren’t stalking teenagers? Did they fall in love? Get married? Have children? Did they have parents? What were their relationships with those parents like? I’d never read anything like that. So, of course, I had to write it myself.
• The aesthetic of Darla Drake, my MMC, is a little bit of a combination of Hela from Thor: Ragnarok and Freya from the God of War games.
• There are a TON of easter eggs in the book for classic monster movies and books. Can anyone guess where the name Camp Crystal Creek came from???
• For the character, er, head of Dolores Drake (Darla’s mom), who is of course very much alive despite being a severed head, I loved the idea of Darla living with her overbearing mother, who gave her grief about her job and her love life, and was even more overbearing because she didn’t have an actual body.
• For the Monster Mash party, I wanted to do my own spin on the famous Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars. Where you walk into this place, and it’s just filled with the coolest, most insane, most diverse collection of monsters, all partying like it’s a Saturday night in college. (let’s just say we’ve all drank some form of quarry water in our lives)

What first attracts your main characters to each other?

When the book begins, Darla Drake, a legendary monster who fears nobody and nothing, has an existential crisis. She needs something in her life, but she isn’t sure what that is. It’s not ‘only’ romance, it’s fulfillment, direction, satisfaction. And when she meets Jarko, while at first she hates him because he’s trying to steal her turf, she realizes that she enjoys his company and how he interests and engages her, mentally and physically. He’s different from her, but she realizes that maybe to find that fulfillment, she needs to change how she looks at things, including herself. As for Jarko, beneath his chaotic (and attractive) exterior, he’s someone who’s harboring a tremendous amount of pain. And he’s never been able to move past it. But with Darla, he’s found a way to experience joy again. To feel like himself again. And, of course, they also both really want to smooch.
 

Using just 5 words, how would you describe your main characters”love affair?

Incendiary, chaotic, deadly, passionate, unhinged.
 

The First Kiss…

Is so passionate and unhinged that it would probably kill normal people

Without revealing too much, what is your favorite scene in the book?

There’s a scene where Darla and Jarko go to a bar full of, let’s just call them very, very bad people, with the intention of doing very, very bad things to them. It feels like a date: two people (er, monsters) going to a bar to have fun. But since they’re monsters who do bad things to bad people, they go in and just wreak all sorts of havoc. And it’s fun and violent and chaotic and hilarious and also really, really funny. It was such a blast to write, and I looked forward to writing it for the entire book.

There were about forty people in the bar. They were all men, mostly bearded and heavily tattooed, with markings that Darla recognized as not particularly friendly. A good portion of them were thick, muscular men who looked like they knew how to handle themselves. They would be the most fun. One man stepped forward. He was enormous, six foot five or so, a slab of a man two hundred and fifty plus pounds, with a beard down to his navel and a shaved head that bore numerous cross tattoos that most definitely did not denote his adherence to Jesus’s teachings.
Several men fell in line behind him, forming a hefty triangle of ignorance.
The man pulled a knife from a sheath, approached the monsters, and said, “Who in the hell do you think you are?”
Darla stepped forward. “Darla Drake. Duchess of Death. Creature of Clear Creek.”
Jarko stepped forward, next to Darla. “Jarko Murkvale.”
Darla waited. When Jarko didn’t speak, she turned to him and whispered, “And?”
“And what?” he whispered back.
“Don’t you have an, I don’t know, cool nickname?”
Jarko looked irritated. “Uh, no. We don’t all go around inventing fancy nicknames for ourselves like Duchess of Death.”
“I didn’t invent that nickname. It was my mom’s and then she passed it to me when I took over and—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Beardy McBigot shouted, holding the knife out. “Leave now or die.”
Darla looked at Jarko and shrugged. “I can think of a third option,” she said.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
Darla brought the scourge down in a wide, arcing motion. Beardy’s knife clattered to the ground. His forearm landed next to it.
Beardy screamed and fell down, while the rest of Beardy’s Bigot Troupe stepped back, their eyes wide in fear. Several bolted for the back door. Before they could reach it, Jarko latched onto a rafter and swung himself over to the far side of the bar, landing in front of the back door.
“Sorry,” he said. “You know what they say about roaches. Once they go in, they don’t go out.”

If your book was optioned for a movie, what scene would be absolutely crucial to include?

The Monster Mash! Just a fun, crazy party full of monsters all letting loose. Thing of it like a huge college party, mixed with a spring break bash, mixed with all the best monsters from horror movies getting drunk and hooking up and waking up with wicked hangovers.

The TohoTown quarry was filled with dozens upon dozens of monsters. The limestone-lined pit itself was fifty feet deep, half a mile wide in every direction, with a small, green-tinged lake in its center. Monster Mashes had been held once a year at the TohoTown quarry for at least the last hundred years, and Darla herself had been going since she was in her early twenties.

She still remembered her very first Monster Mash. She’d met Gretl by Maker’s Marsh, where they’d pregamed with Gretl’s then-boyfriend, Simon Scythe, drinking fermented swamp water until they were sufficiently lubricated for Darla to leave her inhibitions on the banks of the marsh.

Though Darla had met a few monsters over the years—her mother’s friends, Gretl’s various boyfriends, and a few nomad monsters who came through the area—the Monster Mash was
like nothing she’d ever seen. And tonight, the quarry was packed to the walls with monsters of all walks of life (and death), all shapes and sizes, from all over the country and beyond. It was the biggest Mash Darla had ever seen, and when she took it all in, she forgot about Jarko and Dolores and even the hunt and just marveled at how incredible the monster world was, and how much she loved being a part of it.

Readers should read this book …

If they want to laugh on every page, but turn the last page having experienced unexpected feels.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

I’m finishing up the Monsters & Mating trilogy (yes, there will be three books!). After that, I have two books I’m plotting out. One would be a dark romance thriller trilogy, and the other, well, let’s just say if you’ve watched my “men writing women” series on TikTok, you might like this…

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: I’m giving away a signed and personalized copy of DATING & DISMEMBERMENT, your very own knit monster hat, and a pair of custom gold-foiled Darla and Jarko bookmarks!

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you were a legendary monster:
1) What would your name be?
2) Where would you hunt?

 
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Excerpt from DATING & DISMEMBERMENT:

Before Darla had a chance to do or say anything, she found herself face-to-face with the creature she’d watched terrorize Clear Creek. He had one tentacle wrapped around Darla’s neck and the other around her torso, pinning her arms to her body. She was a foot off the ground, her feet dangling, but his grip around her was loose enough not to choke her. She still held the scourge but couldn’t gain enough leverage to use it for anything other than a light dusting.

The monster was, as she suspected, human, or at least humanoid. He stood around six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick chest. He wore black pants and a black and red striped T-shirt. His chest and shoulders resembled that of a human, but the arms extended past the biceps into the very tentacles that restrained Darla. He had short black hair and a stone-gray face with yellow eyes and a pointed, almost regal nose. His facial skin looked smooth—either he was clean shaven, or he did not grow facial hair.

She noticed the long, black overcoat he’d worn the other night hanging from a pointed rock on the wall. A small campfire was set up against the far wall, with an iron post hanging
between two branches over an extinguished flame. Wherever this monster had come from, it was clearly planning to stay a while.
“Let…me…go,” Darla rasped, struggling against the tentacles’ grip.
The monster looked Darla up and down. Its eyes stopped at the scourge in her hand. “What are you planning on doing with that?” he said.
“Depends,” Darla said. “Right now, I’m thinking about hanging your head on the wall next to your coat.”
The monster chortled. Its voice was deep and seemed to echo, like it was coming from deep within a cave. It released the tentacle from around her neck. Darla took a long breath as its arm tentacle shrunk back into its shirtsleeve. It was clearly an extendable appendage, and actually ended in some sort of hand.Its five “fingers” were all the same length, with no fingernails, and a rough-looking texture on the palm that must have made it easier to swing, grip things, and restrain people. Or monsters.
“You’re barely in a position to step on my foot,” the monster said, “let alone decapitate me.”
“Loosen your grip and we’ll find out.”
The monster smiled. “I’ve heard about you. Darla Drake. Creature of Clear Creek. Duchess of Death.” He ran a finger—if you could call it that—over her bone crown. Darla shuddered
in revulsion.
“Well, I’m glad,” she said. “Because I haven’t heard a thing about you.”
The monster’s smile vanished.
“If I let you go,” he said, “will you agree to a détente?”
“A détente? Are you French?”
The monster sighed. “Some of us have spent our lives outside of campgrounds,” he said. “Now, do we have a détente or not?”
Darla looked him over. If he wanted to hurt her, he could have already. She could whip the scourge around and try to lop off his head the moment her arm was freed, but something about his willingness to talk told her he didn’t want violence. She didn’t either, necessarily. She wanted answers. And she wouldn’t get them by making his neck even with his shoulders.
“We do,” she said.
“All right, then.”
He retracted the tentacle gripping her torso. Darla dropped to the ground. The monster watched Darla’s hands, as if waiting to see if she meant what she said, or if she would try to lop off a
limb or two. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. In all her years hunting, she’d never felt truly threatened. As a girl, her mother had told her about her invincibility, how her body could repair itself from all manner of wounds. She could still feel pain, of course, but once you learned to accept the pain and realize that it could never kill you, you could do anything. Yes, standing there opposite this monster, this monster who’d gotten the drop on her, Darla felt exposed. Vulnerable.
Yet, he hadn’t made a move since putting her down.
“Jarko Murkvale,” the monster said. He extended a five-fingered tentacle. Darla looked at it long enough that he retracted the appendage. “Okay, then. Guess you weren’t raised with any manners.”
“Why are you here, Jerkvale?” Darla asked, absently rubbing her neck. The flesh had been sore for a moment where the tentacle had grabbed her, but it had dissipated as soon as he let go.
Jarko cringed. “Jerkvale? What are you, twelve? I hope your scourge is sharper than your wit.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Better,” he said. He pointed to her bone crown. “Hey, are those things real? They look real, but I’ve heard of monsters getting all sorts of weird plastic surgery to make themselves look scarier.”
“I’ll let you find out for yourself when I embed them in your neck,” Darla said. “Now why are you here?”
“On this earth? Well, that’s a long story. I’ll start at the begin—”
“No, smart-ass. Why are you in Clear Creek?”
He sniffed and said, “Why does it matter to you?”
“Because, jackass, Clear Creek is my territory. You’re encroaching.”
“To answer your second part, no, I’m not. To answer your first part, Clear Creek is not your territory. Or at least not anymore.”

Excerpts. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Emily Henry meets Grady Hendrix in the funniest and most original romantic comedy of the year: a monstrously feel good cozy fantasy full of love, laughter, lore, and limbs.

Darla Drake, Duchess of Death, is a legendary monster who has haunted the woods around Camp Clear Creek for years. Until an existential crisis forces her to take a sabbatical from wreaking havoc on pimply teens while she figures out what she really wants from the rest of her (possibly infinite) life. But what does a monster do when her malevolent days are over? For Darla, it’s spending time with the decapitated―yet still overbearing―head of her mother, reading romance novels she steals from campers, and struggling with one monstrous case of melancholy. Until Jarko Murkvale arrives in Clear Creek and turns Darla’s life upside down.

Jarko is a conceited, arrogant, infuriating, and unfortunately for Darla, kind of hot. And with the Duchess of Death on the shelf, Jarko has staked his claim on Camp Clear Creek. But Darla refuses to go down without a fight, and so in order to reclaim her territory she challenges Jarko to a series of hunts to see who the most fearsome monster really is.

But the more mayhem they cause, the more Darla begins to realize there’s more to this brash monster than she believed…and that Jarko may just be the antidote to her ennui. But there’s a reason Jarko came to Clear Creek, and in order to fill her nine-chambered heart, Darla will have to unravel the mystery of who this closed-off monster really is. And if they can manage to not literally tear each other limb from limb, Darla and Jarko just might find that couples who slay together, stay together.
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Meet the Author:

A. L. Brody is the pen name of an internationally bestselling author who grew up loving classic monster movies, and despite a love of watching teenagers get dispatched on screen in ever more creative and horrifying ways, he is deep down a romantic at heart. He is the author of Dating & Dismemberment and Weddings & Witchcraft in the Mating & Monsters series, as well as The Reaper’s Son. He lives with his family in a cave in a swampy hellscape (aka New Jersey). Visit him on TikTok at @JerseyBookGuy or X/Twitter and Instagram at @JasonPinter.
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