The Last Word


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Contents
 Prologue
 Part One
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 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 
 
 Part Two
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 9
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 11
 12
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 17
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 Part Three
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 Part Four
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 38
 Interstitial
 Interstitial
 39
 
 
 Epilogue
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Also by Taylor Adams
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 
 
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 Guide
 
 Cover
 Contents
 Prologue
 
 
 
 
 Dedication
 
 
 For Nolan
 
 
 
 
 
 Prologue
 
 The End.
 
 Emma Carpenter drops her e-reader. Like surfacing from a deep dive with aching lungs, she has never been so grateful to see
 those two words on her paper-white screen.
 
 
 “Thank God.” She rubs her eyes.
 
 She downloaded this bizarre e-book for ninety-nine cents on her neighbor’s recommendation. The novel’s cover art was featureless
 black with a white Comic Sans title: Murder Mountain. Sinister but in a lo-fi way, like a VHS snuff tape. For less than the cost of a candy bar, how can you go wrong?
 
 
 Post-purchase, she’d noticed the subtitle: The Scariest Book You’ll Ever Read.
 
 
 Uh-oh.
 
 The raving blurb was in quotation marks, to appear quoted from a review or notable person, but there was no attributed source.
 It was the author’s personal boast.
 
 
 Uh-oh.
 
 Emma persevered and read on anyway, as the horror novel followed two college coeds backpacking alone in the Appalachian foothills. One is a psych major and the other is a prelaw student studying for the LSAT. They’re more ornaments than people: vain, shrill, stupid, and perhaps the least-convincing lesbians ever written. It’s telling that the most authentic character in the entire book is the serial killer. 
 
 Beyond Emma’s usual gripes with the trapped-in-a-remote-place-with-a-scary-person formula (Why is there never a cell signal? Why does no one ever carry a gun? For the love of God, why do they keep splitting up?), the only thing that kept her reading this hundred-thousand-word death march was an interesting artistic choice: from the
 first page, the novel is narrated entirely from the villain’s first-person point of view. The two women—the characters readers
 are meant to sympathize with—are only ever described through the killer’s eyes.
 
 
 Written in the past tense.
 
 
 One more time: uh-oh.
 
 No surprise, then, that after hours of tedious stalking, the narrator/killer catches Psych alone in her tent and starts to
 strangle her. Prelaw intervenes to save her, but—instead of picking up the killer’s night vision rifle, which he has carelessly
 set aside—she chooses to fight him hand to hand like a dumbass. She’s promptly disemboweled and Psych is promoted to Final
 Girl. Psych also misses the memo to pick up the goddamn gun and instead flees screaming through the forest, stumbling across
 an abandoned cabin that’s within walking distance but never mentioned until now. Of course the parked truck fails to start.
 Of course she traps herself in the only room without an exit. Of course he drives home with her head in a duffel bag.
 
 
 The End.
 
 Thank God for that, at least.
 
 Amazon has the audacity to ask her to rate the book. Out of five stars? One. She makes sure zero isn’t an option. Then she
 types a brief review—likely better written than all of Murder Mountain—but before clicking Submit, she hesitates.
 
 
 Why?
 
 She’s unsure. Her finger hovers in a hair-trigger pause. She imagines her own future self desperately warning of something terrible on the horizon, that she’s about to sign her own death warrant and this is her last chance to change course. The e-book is still unrated, so her one-star review will