Author Rebekah Faubion (Photo – rebekahfaubion.com)
Join young adult horror author Rebekah Faubion at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena for the debut of her hot-off-the-presses novel, Lost Girls of Hollow Lake, on Saturday, January 31st, at 4:00 pm. Packed with tension and perfect for fans of the hit show Yellowjackets, Lost Girls centers on Evie, a lonely teenage girl who was part of a group of eight left behind on a nature trip.
By Melanie Hooks
Only five of them make it back, and a killer might not be done with them yet.
Author Rebekah Faubion will be speaking with fellow author Veronica Bane and signing the book, which is geared toward anyone who has found themselves isolated and misunderstood at some point in their life.
Faubion identifies strongly with that feeling. “There are seasons of your life when you are so misunderstood,” she said in a recent interview. “It can be so isolating. In those moments, we don’t even know we are looking for it, but we need someone to see us and not judge us.”
One of the figures in the book that helps protagonist Evie the most is her dog, Tiger. Animals have always played a key role as encouraging companions in Faubion’s own life. She dedicated Lost Girls to her beloved dog of 16 years, whom she adopted when she was 18 and going through a really rough time. Caring for another living being helped her see outside her own problems while receiving unconditional love at the same time:
The world is bigger than you. Even if it is just this dog. There is something worth fighting for. It can feel really hopeful. There is no story for Eve without Tiger. You can’t know that your dog loves you unconditionally without thinking knowing there is something about you worth loving you.”
Always drawn to storytelling, Faubion wrote her first full movie script at the age of nine. After moving to New York City as a young, married mother in the 1990s, she discovered the world of young adult fiction through the explosion of The Hunger Games books and shifted from scripts to novels, landing an agent quickly.
The journey was far from easy. That agent didn’t sell her work, and neither did a second. Faubion finally broke through by co-authoring a serialized book under a pen name on an online platform, which resulted in the novel Ellie Is Cool, about a young TV writer forced to attend her ten-year high school reunion.
That success led to her first solo book, The Lovers. The novel explores a teenage romance between two girls and coincided with Faubion’s own coming out as bisexual, a story she still speaks about with affection. “It’s so special, a genuinely sweet story,” she said.
Her second book for Berkley Publishing, The Sun and the Moon, came out last summer and also explores queer love, this time with slightly older characters.
The newest release, Lost Girls of Hollow Lake, also features a queer protagonist, and Faubion believes horror is a perfect genre for queer characters to author their own stories. In a genre that once relegated them to killers or victims, she says making a young woman like Evie the protagonist is a reclamation of power.
You’re reclaiming that narrator, and having the power of having the knife…I wanted my protagonist to be an empowered person. She’s a good student with a best friend of her dog. Really fully living her life in a way that queer people can do. Her queerness is just there…The killer is trying to push them [the survivor girls] into something that makes them feel trapped like they were on the island. We have to fight all the time against what people think we should be.”
More about hRebekah Faubion can be found on her website.
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