The Petting Zoo Motel (Tales of the Borderlands Book 1)

Free Breakfast Included—If You Can Make It Through the Night

In the far reaches of Northern Minnesota, where the woods press close and the roads forget where they’re going, lies The Petting Zoo Motel—a derelict compound surrounded by razor wire, half-swallowed by forest, and teeming with paranoia. It’s September 1963 when Billy Green, broke and bruised after a failed road trip, takes a handyman job there hoping for a little rest. What he finds instead is something closer to a waking nightmare.

Inside the high fence, the motel's residents spiral into violence and delusion, each certain the others are mad. Outside, the feral offspring of the long-abandoned zoo stalk the trees under the sway of the Pig Boy—a disfigured ex-employee with a grudge and a machete. Caught between fevered madness and something even darker in the woods, Billy’s only ally is Sally Cass, the motel’s shotgun-wielding maid who talks to God and might be the only sane person left—or the most dangerous of them all.

The Petting Zoo Motel is Book One in Tales of the Borderlands, a quirky, character-driven series set in a half-imagined Northern Minnesota where the strange is commonplace and the border between sanity and something else is already behind you before you realize it.

Get lost in the Borderlands—start with The Petting Zoo Motel today.

Excerpt from the book

Filtch County, Minnesota, 26 September 1963

Sally served Nora her supper in bed. She ate it without complaint, even though she knew it was drugged.

Afterward, Sally lit a cigarette for her, and they shared a mug of hot cocoa sweetened with raw honey from an old hive box on the zoo grounds. The honey calmed Nora down and helped her sleep.

“Ozzy’s coming for me tonight,” she said with a blissful smile.

“You don’t say,” Sally replied, not rising to the bait.

“He visits me every night. He brings me presents.”

Nora had been going on about Ozzy all week, working up a big fantasy in her addled brain. “I’m sure he’s a fine fella,” Sally said.

When Nora’s head started to wobble, Sally took the half-smoked cigarette out of her mouth and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the bedside table.

“You better not come back here tonight,” Nora muttered as Sally shifted her into a comfortable position on the bed. “If he catches you checking up on me, he’ll snap that little spine of yours like a twig.”

Sally had never seen Ozzy. His cabin was a good mile back of the motel, up on Hoodoo Ridge. She had no reason to be up in that part of the woods and no inclination to disturb him. Judging by the size of his footprints, he was tall, heavyset, and always had three dogs with him. The dogs she figured for pit bull terriers. She hoped he had no intention of coming down to the motel for Nora or anyone else.

Nora was snoring when Sally handcuffed her wrists to the metal bed frame. Leaving all the lights on, she scanned the cluttered room. “I know you got it hidden in here somewhere,” she said.

There were three heathen idols on a short shelf above the threadbare reading chair. Placed there to frighten her, no doubt—so that’s where she started. These weren’t the genuine articles. They had colored glass instead of jewels for eyes, and if you scratched their paint with a knife, you found lead underneath, not gold. The real ones were hidden somewhere up on Goat Mountain where no one could get at them.

Pushing the obscene statuettes aside, she rapped on the paneling behind them with her knuckles. She kept tapping, listening for a hollow sound, looking for telltale signs of disturbance in the thin layer of dust. She worked her way down the wall until she came to a stack of big sketchbooks piled on the floor. She moved them carefully aside and checked the baseboards. No luck.

Next—the desk. This wasn’t standard motel furniture; it was an antique brought over from the basement of the house. No doubt it was riddled with hidden compartments but none big enough to hide what she was looking for, so she pushed it away from the wall and checked behind it. Still, no luck.

She stood for a minute, chewing on a strand of hair that had fallen from her braid.