Hot Singles in Your Area
'Hot Singles in Your Area is a long joke, an experimental novel, and a conversation starter' Locus Magazine
'Shiveley writes like a ghoul living in the haunted house that is the internet' Meg Elison, author of 'The Road to Nowhere' trilogy
A biting, post-modern horror about day jobs and monsters - one of which will devour you whole, but perhaps not the one that you think.
Noah desperately needs a new job that involves less blood and piss than his current one. So, when he spots an ad for a newspaper with 'No experience preferred', he puts on his good shirt and marches down to their average-looking office to unknowingly sign his life away.
Malachia is the only human left in the City of Silence and she spends her time wandering its empty, bone-filled streets. Until one day she finds a lone figure hunched over a typewriter, his fingers enmeshed with the keys. Could he be the answer to finding her missing girlfriend?
Propelled by their pursuits for rent money and truth, Noah and Malachia are pushed to their limits by a sinister media powerhouse. Will either of them survive the darkness that ensues?
Everyone's talking about Hot Singles in Your Area. . .
'Came for the body horror, stayed for the detailed world-building and pinpoint satire' - Reader review
'If The Hitchhiker's Guide and The Ministry of Time had a horrific baby with multiple rows of teeth' - Reader review
'One of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had this year. It's unlike anything I've read before' - Reader review
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Community Reviews
There are some fun elements to this, like the fake ads with weird tales and random tangents, or later when it keeps rephrasing "nine" as other combinations of numbers. But, this just felt like the precursor to the real story. There are a bunch of questions without any answers, and the protagonists haven't really even begun their quest at the end. This is more about collecting various pieces of unsettling imagery and the humorous tidbits in things like super wordy titles of things/entities (although sometimes the repetition made it feel like the author was trying too hard). I think there could be an interesting story here if it kept going. Malachia's story is about her being sent on a quest by a more powerful being, but all she accomplishes by the end is to get to a place where she can start doing it, but still knows nothing. If shortened, I would prefer this to be the first act and not the entirety of the book. I would have even given more stars if there had been more memos at the end to detail some of the events that occurred after.
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