This. book. OMG.
has a demi-biromantic asexual main character
🖤 has trans and gay rep
is a dark fantasy
has a villain romance
Thank you to the Fantastic Flying Book Club for giving me the opportunity to be on this tour!
Don’t miss the giveaway at the end of this post! 
Beyond the Black Door
by A.M. Strickland
SYNOPSIS
Kamai was warned never to open the black door, but she didn’t listen…
Everyone has a soul. Some are beautiful gardens, others are frightening dungeons. Soulwalkers―like Kamai and her mother―can journey into other people’s souls while they sleep.
But no matter where Kamai visits, she sees the black door. It follows her into every soul, and her mother has told her to never, ever open it.
When Kamai touches the door, it is warm and beating, like it has a pulse. When she puts her ear to it, she hears her own name whispered from the other side. And when tragedy strikes, Kamai does the unthinkable: she opens the door.
A.M. Strickland’s imaginative dark fantasy features court intrigue and romance, a main character coming to terms with her asexuality, and twists and turns as a seductive mystery unfolds that endangers not just Kamai’s own soul, but the entire kingdom…
“A dark delight, gorgeously written and as twisty and enigmatic as a labyrinth at twilight. I wanted to stay lost in its pages forever, wandering ever deeper into the maze of Strickland’s beguiling, intricately imagined world.”
—Margaret Rogerson, New York Times bestselling author of An Enchantment of Ravens
Favorite Quotes
“Some secrets weren’t meant to be discovered. Some doors not meant to be opened. I’d already made that mistake once, and I shouldn’t be tempted to do it again.”
🖤 “You’re mine. I embraced you before your mother did. My lips touched your brow before hers. I protected you from the world first.”
🖤 “Books were doors I was allowed to open with the flick of a wrist…unlike the black door.”
🖤 “I simply adore the delicate was you put things. How you cover the truth with softness to make it less sharp. Rose blossoms over thorns.”
Excerpt
I was five the first time I asked my mother
about the black door. The moment seared itself into my memory.
We were walking together through her soul, my
hand in hers, the deep blue tiles of the place that was both hers and her
as cool as water beneath my silk-slippered feet.
We’d done this for as long as I could remember,
exploring her soul while our bodies slumbered, our spirits free to traverse the
sleeping realm to which souls belonged. My mother would explain how people such
as us—soulwalkers—could wander souls by night, and she would describe the gods.
And yet she never mentioned the black door I always found in her soul.
On this particular night, I finally gathered my
courage and stopped in the wide hallway, pointing. “Mama, what is that door?”
In my mother’s soul, the sandstone halls were
rosy, lit as if a fireplace burned merrily next to every stretch of wall. There
was no fire; it was my mother’s warmth, her light. The walls were pale
and smooth, perforated with airy latticework that revealed the glow of rooms
beyond, as if there were nothing to hide here, while the long hallways with
deep azure tiles beckoned like fingers, hinting at wonders just out of sight.
But the black door was closed tight. Its sleek black
surface parted the creamy sandstone of the wall like a slick dark stone in
bright water, the sinuous lines of its frame meeting in a point at the apex. It
gleamed like midnight fire. Despite seeming to draw in the light around it, it
lured me like a candle’s flame.
By then I’d learned that fire would burn me …
but only through touching it several times already. I’d never touched the black
door, and I wanted to.
This dark, tantalizing danger didn’t seem to
belong in my mother’s bright, inviting soul. My mother, her eyes narrowing,
stared at the door for a moment, her jaw clenched, a look on her beautiful face
like I’d never seen. There was resolve, anger, and yes, fear. I’d never before
seen my mother afraid.
Turning away, she knelt before me, took both my
hands, and said very seriously, “Kamai, you can never open that door. It’s best
if you just forget about it.”
“But, Mama, you said I could go anywhere in your
sleep house.”
A smile tugged at her mouth. “My soul house, not
my ‘sleep house.’ It’s about time you started using the proper name: nehym.”
The word actually meant “soul house” in the old tongue. “And that door isn’t a
part of my nehym. It belongs to somewhere else. You must understand how these
things work, Kamai, because someday you’ll be able to walk anyone’s soul at
your whim and find what you will inside. But you must never”—she leaned closer,
holding my eyes with the liquid brown of her gaze—“open that door.”
Trepidation overrode my curiosity. “Is it hiding
something bad?”
She leaned forward to brush her lips over my
forehead—lips, I would one day learn, that were the envy of both men and women.
Marin Nuala’s lips, I’d later hear someone say, could unlock
anyone’s. “Something very bad. Something evil. You won’t be safe from what’s
behind it. It wants the door to open.”
I was both intrigued and disturbed that the evil
thing behind the black door could want, that it had desires … and that
it was lurking in my mother’s nehym. “What is it?”
She stared at me for a long moment. “I pray
you’ll never know.” She stood and strolled the hall, away from the black door.
Even here, where only I could see her, she dressed like a queen, her pale skin
accented by a silk blue gown that swirled about her hips as she walked, her
belt of fine gold links glimmering in the warm light. “Now, come, tell me what
else I’ve taught you this evening. If you repeat it true, I’ll give you a
surprise.”
I couldn’t keep the excitement from my voice.
“Will it be my own sleep hou—nehym?” I could learn quickly, when I had an
incentive.
My mother glanced down, rare sadness in her
gaze. “You don’t have one, my dearest.”
My feet ground to a halt. Everyone’s soul was a
house. It could be as dark, primitive, and dank as a cave, or as vast, ornate,
and mazelike as a palace. My mother’s nehym was as warm and welcoming as a
sprawling country villa, but with so many halls and wings and doors, no walls
in the waking world could have contained it. To not have my own made me want to
cry until I got one.
“Do I not have a soul?” I asked.
“Of course you do, sweetness,” she said, swiping
away my brimming tears with her thumbs. “It’s only that sometimes these things
are hidden from us, kept secret, even from within.” She placed two warm
fingertips over my heart. “You don’t have a nehym because your soul is so
deeply asleep that no one can find it. No one can walk your halls and discover
your secrets that way.”
Something flickered across her face, like a
shadow, and I knew she wasn’t telling me the entire truth. Even then I had a
decent sense of such things.
“It is good that it stays hidden,” she added,
smoothing down my hair, a tousled mirror of her own cascade of dark curls. “For
it stays safe.”
“Like from the evil creature behind the black
door?”
She drew in a breath. “You’re safe from it. But
I don’t want you to speak of the door or what’s behind it anymore.”
“Did you open the door?” I asked,
glancing over my shoulder. “Is that why it’s here?”
She shook her head. “No, my darling. It’s here
because you are. It follows you, because it knows that only you can open the
door. But that’s why I’m safe too, because I know you won’t. Now, tell me what
else you’ve learned this evening. No more talk of the other thing. Who can walk
the halls of souls and discover the sleeper’s deepest secrets?”
“People like you. And me,” I added, with some
satisfaction. “And priests and priestesses. But we’re different from them,
because we’re soulwalkers.” That was what my mother called us. At five years
old, I didn’t understand everything by far, but I at least knew for sure we
weren’t priestesses, since I found going to temples dreadfully dull, and this
wasn’t dull. And besides, everyone knew that priests and priestesses could
explore souls. No one knew we could.
“And what is a soulwalker, when we’re
asleep like we are now?”
“A spirit.” Which was a layman’s term for our
cerebral, conscious aspect—just like the soul was our subconscious, but I
didn’t yet know any of those words.
“And who can know what we do?”
“No one,” I said quickly.
“Not even Hallan and Razim, remember?”
I nodded with proper solemnity. Hallan and Razim
were the closest thing I had to family after my mother, close to a stepfather
and stepbrother, though not quite. It had been difficult not to brag about my
secret soulwalking ability to Razim, older than me by a couple of years, but
I’d managed.
And now it seemed like there was a new rule that
was just as serious, if not more so, than never betraying the secret of our
soulwalking:
Never open the black door.
I didn’t press her about it, because I wanted to
believe it was as simple as that: I wouldn’t open the door, and my mother and I
would be safe. And maybe, if I learned enough about soulwalking, practiced hard
enough, not only would I make my mother proud, but someday I would find my own
soul.
“Now tell me the gods’ story,” my mother said.
I drew myself up as tall as possible. “In the
very beginning of time, there was a husband and a wife, and they were
surrounded by darkness.”
“The Darkness,” my mother corrected.
“That’s what I meant. Darkness kept following
them, trying to swallow them, so they always had to move. But one day, they
were going to have a baby, so they stopped running. They fought the Darkness
back to make a home for the baby, and then circled her every night after she
was born to keep the Darkness away. They’re our sun and moon, and their
daughter is the earth.”
It was a highly distilled version of the gods’
history, but it was easy enough to remember. Simple stories for a simple age,
and yet it was a story we all on some level believed. It comforted me to think
of bright parents hovering over a sleeping girl’s bed, keeping her safe from
danger.
Despite that, I was already drawn to dark
mysteries. And my question about the door had only left me with the burn of
unassuaged curiosity. Later, I couldn’t even recall what my mother’s promised
surprise had been, but I could remember the way my eyes drifted back, seeking
one last glimpse of the black door.
* * *
I was nine when I first touched the door.
Razim drove me to do it. A guest was staying at
our villa—well, my “stepfather’s” villa, where my mother and I lived with him
and Razim. My mother and Hallan weren’t actually married, though they pretended
they were, presiding together over Hallan’s home of pale tile floors, arching
doorways, mosaic-patterned ceilings, and fountained courtyards, buried in the
coastal forest near the capital. It was a mask, my mother said, for who they
really were, what they really did. But what it masked, I didn’t yet know.
Early that evening, after our parents had gone
upstairs with the guest, Razim and I stayed downstairs under the watchful eye
of our tutor. A nighttime breeze wafted the sheer white curtains in front of
the open shutters, letting in the coolness and the scent of flowers growing
outside the windows. I was practicing my letters, but Razim was only pretending
to read a book, actually practicing a look of haughty adult boredom, the
very picture of a young lordling in his new silk shirt embroidered in shades of
deep red like his father often wore. When our tutor left the study to relieve
himself, Razim’s boredom vanished, revealing the boy of eleven. He grinned at
me, white teeth and bronze cheeks glowing in the candlelight, and whispered, “I
know what our parents are doing up there.”
My mother had told me only that she and Hallan
secreted themselves away with their guests for business.
“I do too,” I said, glancing down at my paper
and betraying the lie.
Razim smirked. “What are they doing, then?”
“Work,” I said.
“I know exactly how they work,” Razim
said slyly. “My father told me.”
I knew my mother would often walk in the souls
of various guests, but I was never to tell Hallan and Razim, just as I was
never, ever supposed to mention the black door. Not that I had much to
tell about the latter. Whatever secrets my mother whispered about soulwalking,
about the cities and people of Eopia, about the gods and half-forgotten myths,
she wouldn’t tell me anything more about it. As if it didn’t tug at my
attention whenever I soulwalked with her—and only her so far, never
alone—despite my trying to ignore it. It was like a secret I had to keep even
from myself.
But now Razim knew something else about the
nature of their work.
“How, then?” I asked.
He leaned over the polished inlay of the wooden
table, his black hair glinting, and whispered, “They have sex. I’ll bet you
don’t know what that is.”
“I do too,” I said, even though I didn’t
exactly. My mother had explained the basics, and that I wasn’t to do any of it
until I was older. Which was fine by me, because it sounded like a supremely
awkward thing I never wanted to do. I’d had no clue that was what she was doing
upstairs with the guests.
“What is it, then?” Razim pressed.
I looked down, feeling suddenly uncomfortable.
“You get naked, and you, you know, do it. Down there.”
Razim seemed disappointed that I knew even that much, and he leaned back. “Yeah, well, they do it with all sorts of people. My father has even done it with the queen consort.” I gave him a skeptical look. We didn’t have a queen like we had a king, because the official queen, at least in absentia, was Ranta, the earth goddess, daughter of Tain and Heshara, the sun god and moon goddess. Just as Tain was the guardian of spirits and all things cerebral, as fiery and exacting as the sun, and Heshara was guardian of souls and the sleeping realm, as cool and mysterious as the changing, shadowy faces of the moon, Ranta was the beautiful guardian of physical bodies, and thus had married the first king of the land both to better protect the earth and to gain further protection herself from the encroachment of Darkness. No one had ever seen Ranta, of course, not even her husband, but every time a new king rose to power and took the sacred oath to the earth goddess, people swore they could feel her blessing settle over them like a warm blanket.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AdriAnne Strickland was a bibliophile who wanted to be an author before she knew what either of those words meant. She shares a home base in Alaska with her husband, her pugs, and her piles and piles of books. She loves traveling, dancing, vests, tattoos, and every shade of teal in existence, but especially the darker ones. She is the coauthor of Shadow Run and Shadow Call (Delacorte/Penguin Random House) and author of the forthcoming Beyond the Black Door (Imprint/Macmillan).
Check out AdriAnne on her website or over on Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
BOOK LINKS
Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Google Books
GIVEAWAY
Enter the giveaway to win a signed hardcover copy of Beyond the Black Door!
- US only
- End Date: November 6, 2019
BOOK TOUR
Check out the rest of the stops along this blog tour!
Like this:
Like Loading...
Ever since her mother walked out, Trix McCabe has been determined to make it on her own. And with her near-magical gift for pulling valuables off unsuspecting strangers, Trix is confident she has what it takes to survive. Until she’s caught and given a choice: jail time, or go live with her long-lost family in the tiny town of Rocksaw, Kansas.
Miranda Asebedo was born and raised in rural Kansas with a love of fast cars, open skies, and books. She carried that love of books to college, where she got her B.A. and M.A. in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Literature. A Seaton Fellowship recipient, her short fiction has appeared in Kansas Voices, Touchstone, and Midway Journal. 
Multiple award-winning young adult author Sara Ella reimagines The Little Mermaid in a powerful and unexpected way.
Once upon a time, Sara Ella dreamed she would marry a prince and live in a Disney castle. Today, she spends her days throwing living room dance parties for her two princesses, raising her little prince to be a king, and conquering realms of her own imaginings. Oh, and her husband is definitely more swoon-worthy than any Prince Charming.
Hope had abandoned them to the wrath of all the waters.
Author London Shah is a British-born Muslim of Pashtun ethnicity. She has lived in Britain’s capital city for most of her life via England’s beautiful North. When she’s not busy re-imagining the past, plotting an alternate present or dreaming up a surreal future, then she’s most likely drinking copious amounts of tea, eating all the sweets and cakes, strolling through Richmond Park or along the Thames, getting lost on an evening in the city’s older, darker alleyways—preferably just after it’s rained—listening to punk rock, or losing herself in a fab SFF book or film. If she could have only one super power, it would be to breathe underwater. The Light at the Bottom of the World is her debut novel.
The Lunar Chronicles meets Rook in this queer #OwnVoices science-fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer and Sharon Cameron.
Rosiee Thor began her career as a storyteller by demanding that her mother listen as Rosiee told bedtime stories instead of the other way around.
From the moment she first learned to read, literary genius Darcy Wells has spent most of her time living in the worlds of her books. There, she can avoid the crushing reality of her mother’s hoarding and pretend her life is simply ordinary. But when a new property manager becomes more active in the upkeep of their apartment complex, the only home Darcy has ever known outside of her books suddenly hangs in the balance.
Laura is a Cuban-American Californian who can be found haunting her favorite coffee shops, drooling over leather jackets, and wishing she was in London or Paris. She lives in San Diego with her husband and two superstar children.
After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, designed to be the playthings of royals, usurped their owners’ estates and bent the human race to their will.
Nina Varela is a nationally awarded writer of screenplays and short fiction. She was born in New Orleans and raised on a hippie commune in Durham, North Carolina, where she spent most of her childhood playing in the Eno River, building faerie houses from moss and bark, and running barefoot through the woods. These days, Nina lives in Los Angeles with her writing partner and their tiny, ill-behaved dog. She tends to write stories about hard-won love and young people toppling the monarchy/patriarchy/whatever-archy. On a related note, she’s queer. On a less related note, she has strong feelings about hushpuppies and loves a good jambalaya. Crier’s War is her first novel. 