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Join us in-person to meet and listen to authors, illustrators, and performers from across Canada! Check back regularly to see additions to our 2026 lineup!
CALE PLETT is a nonbinary, genderfluid writer who lives on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They grew up on a dead-end gravel road and used to get lost in the woods for fun, scary, abandoned cabin and all. Now they write YA novels that span everything from high school rock bands to nightmares in the woods to reality TV gone wrong. They are the author of the queer YA romance Wavelength, an Indie Next pick, and YA horror novel The Saw Mouth, with another standalone YA horror novel, Stranglehold, coming in fall 2027.
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For fans of The Last Bookstore on Earth and Compound Fracture, a heart-pounding rural horror following a genderqueer teen who survives a near-apocalypse, only to be hunted by a mysterious monster whose very existence is entwined with their own.
From a breathtaking new voice in YA, this story is for anyone haunted by the sins of past generations—and fighting to right them.
When Cedar was a child, fragmented, tortured souls woke up in the world’s most complex machines, destroying them and pushing technology back decades. A fall. The Fall, some said, and they called it Autumn.
Ten years later, following a family tragedy, Cedar moves to the nowhere town of Sawblade Lake only to find something hunting them. A long, bent shadow that reeks like rot and has the mouth of a deep crevice. It’s after Cedar, and it’s willing to go to any lengths to break them, including preying on Cedar’s new queer family.
The closer it circles, the more it seems to weave through Cedar’s whole life. It might stretch back to their mother’s gruesome, inexplicable death, to the murk of their missing family, to the house they grew up in. Back and back and back to the first day of Autumn.
Cedar thought they understood how their world had changed, but they’re far from dredging the bottom.