FIRST BORN
The Blood Remembers
Twenty-five year old Leah uses sex to kill wealthy men, AKA 'trust fund babies,' she meets in Nashville bars, and though she doesn’t understand her urges, a man she calls The Watcher might.
FIRSTBORN: The Blood Remembers is an 85,000-word romantic horror that blends the intergenerational darkness of John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine with the Southern gothic vibes of A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher.
When Leah’s latest kill hits the Nashville news, she’s drawn into a columned Belle Meade plantation mansion, and into the orbit of The Watcher, whom she tries, and fails, to kill. With her roommate and fellow predator, Claire, Leah uncovers long-buried secrets in the attic trunks; papers that tie her to the plantation’s matriarch, Estelle, and to a cult buried deep in the Cumberland Plateau. As the truth unspools, Leah understands she isn’t just hunting monsters—she needs to decimate them.
Told in a darkly comic, lyrical voice, FIRSTBORN: The Blood Remembers explores the blurred lines between victim and predator, inheritance and identity, and what it costs to build a self from the wreckage of family.
DEBUT NOVEL
ABOUT MERRICK
MERRICK SCAIFE
British native Merrick Scaife was born on the Isle of Wight, and has lived in various parts of Cyprus, California, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Merrick moved to Kent where she taught primary school education in a small historic village school. She spent a couple of adventurous years in Cyprus before finding her way to America. Merrick is an active member of Writing Away Refuge and The Porch Writers’ Collective in Nashville, Tennessee, and a previous winner of Writing Away Refuge’s First Chapter Contest. Her shorter fiction has been recognized by Bath Flash Fiction’s novella-in-flash award.