DESCRIPTION: Emily's always had a second sense when it comes to death, a gift that's isolated her from the world. But when a road trip with her sister across the Great Plains leads to an abandoned church, Emily discovers that its mummified, undead congregants have been waiting for her. A night of grotesque passion awaits her, a blasphemously erotic communion between the living and the dead. EXCERPT: Emily dared to open her eyes again, and she found herself staring up at the crooked limbs and cadaverous shapes crouched all around her. They might have been mummies, dried papyrus flesh and dusty bones, incense and lilies masking the pungent stench of death, all leering down at her through the milky white fog of their eyes. Two of them crouched beneath her shoulders and she winced as their clammy jaws yawned and clamped around the full pale globes of her breasts. Their teeth pinched and lightly squeezed the base of each mound, jutting the peaks of her orbs up to meet the slick ice-water strokes of their tongues, and she groaned aloud at the crinkling tightness of her pink nipples against them. Her frenzied thoughts drifted vaguely back to last summer’s reading list, to John Steinbeck; she might have been Rose of Sharon offering her heavy bosom to a starving man, nursing him like a hungry newborn, except that even Rosasharn never had to contend with a pair of withered undead working both of her twinging, swelling beads at once. And whatever nourishment they sought from her breasts, it came sweeping through the warm, electric pulse of her nerve endings, the pleasure trilling through her nipples with each rolling lick. Yin and yang, darkness and light: her essence blazed in ways she never could have known except against this contrast of silence and deathly stillness. She burned for them as they melted for her, opposite poles drawn into an irresistible magnetic pull. They wanted her as the damned want salvation.