Halloween Hearts is an anthology of true love & spooky romance; twelve tales of cursed love, monstrous meet-cutes, dark and stormy witchcraft, and happily ever hauntings. You can get your copy just in time for Halloween (and get your name included as a supporter) by backing the project on Kickstarter.
Author Kate MacLeod begins her story with this sentence: For Anne-Marie, coming back to Sleepy Hollow was like sliding back into a dream.
I love that line for what it means inside the story itself, and for what it means to us as humans coming back to an iconic literary world. Anne Marie, you see, is a broken woman, slipping back to her hometown in an attempt to pick up the pieces of her shattered life, only to get caught up in the events that Washington Irving made into a classic. In other words, “The Sleepy Hollow Boys” is a fun bit of intrigue that delves back into the machinations that happen around the legend of Ichabod Crane, which is a tragedy of sorts—or is it? It’s a story built around love, too, as is the OG of the genre. (Sleepy Hollow retellings are almost a genre, isn’t it?)
It’s a mystery.
A romance.
A battle of competitors.
It’s a story steeped in intrigue and heavy in place. It plays with human emotions, group dynamics, and individual dreams. There are, after all, layers upon layers here. “The Sleepy Hollow Boys” is a fun story because it peels the onion in surprising and satisfying ways.