Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Mackenzie Reed to HJ!
Hi Mackenzie and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell!
Hi reader!
Please summarize the book for the readers here:
I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell follows a down-on-her-luck receptionist who catches her hot boss performing an exorcism at the office after hours. When their emotional support coworker goes missing, they team up for a road trip to corporate Hell to save her, the world – and maybe fall in love.
Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:
“Don’t be too flattered. I do it for all my favorite takeout.” (#iykyk)
Please share a few Fun facts about this book…
I have so many, it’s tough to choose!
- my imagining of Hell is inspired by the Upside Down in “Stranger Things” and the capitalistic vibe of “Monsters Inc.”
- while drafting, sometimes I would listen to Hozier’s “Eat Your Young” on a loop for hours. I now consider it the book’s theme song.
- I was asked to amp up the spicy scene while editing the book, so you can thank my editors and agent for Chapter 27!
What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?
Both Brie and Luke are drawn to each other initially for the same reason – that out of everyone in the Curated Care office, they’re the two who aren’t willing to overshare or lay down roots. But what eventually makes Luke attracted to Brie is how brave and strong she is, even in the face of the horrors of Hell. On Brie’s side, she starts to peel back Luke’s layers and realize how protective and loyal he is to those he cares about. They really bond over the fact that they both have tough pasts, but that doesn’t have to define them forever.
Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?
Writing Chapter 27 definitely had me hiding under the covers! It was the first spicy scene I had ever written knowing my name was going to be attached to it, so that upped the stakes. But I loved how it turned out and it gave me a lot of confidence for writing future ones. Here’s a little peek…
“Look at me,” he says softly, tilting my chin up to meet his eyes. I do, and for a long moment, it’s just this: his thumb brushing my jaw, my fingers stroking the short hairs on the back of his neck, our gazes locked as a million emotions pass between us.
Readers should read this book….
Because it’s FUN! While there are some heavy topics within, like grief and PTSD, Brie and Luke’s journey is a wild ride meant to supply a dose of escapism for readers who are hungry for a sweeping adventure with a healthy helping of romance. It’s been so gratifying to hear how many readers have had the best time living in this chaotic world for a bit.
What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?
I’m currently working on my next adult book, which isn’t a sequel but is another hellish delight! On the young adult side, my third YA thriller comes out on February 9th, titled WORSE THAN THE OTHERS. It follows an aspiring true crime detective who gets invited to a party at a haunted hotel only to discover that she’s trapped there with five murder suspects and needs to get the killer to confess by dawn, or they all die.
Thanks for blogging at HJ!
Giveaway: A copy of I HOPE THIS EMAIL FINDS YOU IN HELL by Mackenzie Reed.
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Excerpt from I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell:
One second, there is a door between us.
The next, there isn’t.
A blast of hot air scorches my face as the window I’m peering through shatters, the wood around it encased in flames that turn it instantly to ash. Debra’s body rams into mine with the force of a linebacker gunning for a Super Bowl ring. We go flying into my desk and the breath beats out of me as we skid over the laminate surface.
The monitor I spend eighty percent of my day cursing at to load faster crashes to the ground only a second before we do. My squeaky rolly chair breaks my fall, but glides away quickly, leaving my head to smack onto the plastic carpet protector.
Everything might be broken, or nothing, or something. I can’t tell, but fuck, it hurts. My lungs are stunned, like they forgot how to work. Debra fell next to me, but now she scrambles to straddle my waist in a move that I will be sure to file an HR complaint about.
Except I might not survive to see the paperwork. She lifts her head, her neck cracking as the endless black of her eyes devours me. It’s like her pupils ate her green irises and surrounding whites. Her tongue flicks out, licking her lips in a barbaric manner as hot breath shoots across my face. I gag, the stench rancid and metallic. Like blood.
“Pretty,” she rasps, her voice hers but not. A finger comes up to trail the side of my face, catching on one of my curls that made its way into my mouth. She tugs it out. “Tasty.”
“I’m really not,” I rush out, but my voice is so pinched with fear and adrenaline, I’m not sure she can hear me. “Compared to your gingersnaps, you’ll be so disappointed.”
Her legs pin my left hand to my body, but my right is free. My fingers brush something plastic; my stapler that got knocked off the desk.
“Hungry,” she rasps harder, her mouth opening to an impossible angle, like she’s about to eat me. What in the Silence of the Lambs–
She roars in pain as I smash the stapler into her temple. “Bad!” She screeches, a gust of sweltering heat surely singing my eyebrows. “Dead!”
Her mouth opens again as her hand slams down on my right wrist to thwart another attack. “I’m sorry for the email!” I shoot out, though this is clearly not the Debra I prodded an hour ago. Still, it’s all I can think of, me and my nagging and exclamation points.
Suddenly, her weight is gone. I scramble on my elbows and ass, backing up until my head knocks into the filing cabinet behind my desk. My jaw drops.
Luke holds Debra by a fistful of her silver-streaked hair, wrenching her head back so the arch of her wrinkled throat faces the ceiling.
“Get the fuck back where you belong,” he growls, throwing her down the cubicle-lined aisle. She crashes through the glass wall of his office, landing like a sack of potatoes on the pentagram tarp.
I’ve never heard Luke swear. He’s always cool and collected. But like Debra, this is not a Luke I know. The man before me with muscles rippling under his torn white dress shirt, his sharp jaw set in a fierce scowl, his eyes burning with fury – this Luke is hot and stressed.
“The salt! Brie!”
And apparently, he does know my name.
“On my desk! Get the damn salt!”
The world snaps back into focus with bitter, horrifying clarity. Luke steps through the shattered glass wall of his office before Debra can lunge out. On the ground where the door used to be, there’s a broken line of white. I must have done that when I peeked. Beyond it on the corner of Luke’s desk is a sizable box of salt.
I rush into Luke’s office, trying to dodge flailing limbs from both Luke and Debra as they wrestle on the pentagram. I grab the salt.
“All along there!” Luke instructs, jerking his head toward the only side of the office not walled off. With shaking hands, the salt pours from the box as I make a crooked line past the original by the door. My flats crunch on bits of shattered glass and ruined vinyl blinds.
Whatever effect the salt has makes Debra – or whatever is in Debra – fall to her knees. It allows Luke to stumble backwards out of the pentagram and resume his Latin. Debra tries to get up, but Luke’s words get faster and louder. It knocks her down so she’s sitting on her heels.
“This is only the beginning!” she screams, the sound scraping my eardrums. I slam my hands over my ears as another roar tears out of her open mouth. The shadowy black mass tugs out of her toward the ceiling, where a swirling cloud of darkness appears from nowhere. It reminds me of cartoon storm clouds, the kinds I’d see in elementary school during tornado drill trainings.
As soon as the black mass touches the edges of the darkness, it gets sucked up and disappears like a smoke and mirrors illusion. Luke’s chanting stops and the cloud dissipates, leaving Debra to topple over in a limp heap.
Silence wraps around us save for our heavy breaths. Luke props himself on the edge of his desk, drained. The box of salt is still in my hand, my stapler still in the other. I glance between the two, and when I look back up at him, he’s staring at me with an unreadable expression.
“Did you just–” My voice catches as what I witnessed hits me. “Did you just perform an exorcism on Debra from Accounting?”
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Book Info:
When staying late at the office leads to witnessing an exorcism, Brie Benson’s mundane life takes a hellish turn…literally.
After her parents’ death, twenty-seven-year-old Brie has mastered the art of compartmentalization to survive her mind-numbing routine as a receptionist at a life insurance company. But when she accidentally catches her hot, uptight boss, Luke, performing an exorcism on Debra from accounting, her carefully ordered world implodes.
Swearing Brie to secrecy, Luke reveals he’s from a line of demon hunters and that demonic activity is spiking. But when her emotional support coworker vanishes, Brie is determined to find her. With nothing left to lose, she convinces Luke to let her join his rescue mission.
The problem? Their destination is hell. And the entrance is in Times Square.
Now Brie and Luke must navigate a corporate underworld of monsters and bureaucratic nightmares while racing to save their colleague and repair a tearing veil between worlds. All before their growing feelings become irrelevant and hell claims them forever.
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Meet the Author:
Mackenzie Reed is the author of the young adult novels The Rosewood Hunt, The Wilde Trials, and Worse Than the Others, and the adult novel I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell. She cultivated her love of storytelling at Nazareth College, where she graduated with a BA in communication and media. A native of upstate New York, she can usually be found spending time with her family, trying to outwalk her plot holes, and living out her authorly dream of writing in local cafes.
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