Memento Mori: Quella & Garnet

Novel #20 Memento Mori: Quella & Garnet is a contemporary paranormal romance with dark psychological and gothic overtones. I wrote it in 2018 and again and again through this year ending up with two complete versions and umpteen partial versions. With another version reaching over 54,000 words from October 27-November 20, I finally said enough is enough and stopped writing this book. I went back to the two completed novels and chose the one I had written first. It had all the elements I wanted to put into it. It was darker and a bit grittier than the second version, but that's okay.

The story is about a young woman named Quella Pryce who has had a less than ideal upbringing. Her grandparents gained custody of her when she was fifteen. She's worked for her grandmother in an antiques shop called Memento Mori which specializes in antique and vintage mourning items and apparel. Quella is also a taphophile who loves wandering through the huge Storey Street Cemetery taking pictures of the Victorian era monuments, statues, gravestones, and mausoleums. It's there that she's seen Grimshaw and Sons conducting funerals and noticed Garnet Grimshaw who has quite a reputation from when he was in high school and college, but he seems to have grown up and settled down.

In 1873 an undertaker named Garnett Grimshaw, the namesake ancestor of the present day Garnet, fell in love with the younger daughter of a wealthy businessman when his family's undertaking business was hired to handle her mother's funeral. The teenaged girl, named Quella Prys, fell in love with Garnett. The young lovers had a secret, passionate love affair over the summer and into the fall. When she discovered that se was carrying his child, he turned to his parents for help in planning to spirit Quella away and marry her. Before their plans could be finalized, he became gravely ill and suddenly died. A few months later Quella was thrown out of her home and disowned when her condition could no longer be concealed. In 1874, not quite nineteen yet, she died in childbirth. The Grimshaws had the infant buried with Garnett in Storey Street Cemetery, but Quella vanished from public records with no death certificate on file, no record of her burial anywhere.

Garnet enlists Quella's help in researching their namesakes' story. Quella can see and communicate with Garnett's ghost and is guided by Quella's spirit to find some missing items that will help them put together the entire story of the past lovers. Both Garnet and Quella are struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety due to events in their pasts. While working to move forward, events keep happening that cause them to have to fight harder to keep their demons at bay.

In a shocking conclusion both of them are rattled by the betrayal of someone they've trusted and relied upon, and the realization that what they have both been looking for has been right there with them all along.