The Scamp - Softcover

An intense, riveting saga of ... a girl's determination to take control.

Thought you had a black sheep? Meet Rayelle's cousin.

Jennifer Pashley's debut novel The Scamp is pure grit: harsh, unsettling, impossible to ignore and impossible to shake off. . . It's rare to read about a female serial killer, and Pashley's debut . . . will become the gold standard.

Like the serial killer in her novel, Pashley takes the damaged bodies and souls of her characters, narrates to us the intimate details of their lives and the pain they've gone through, and then rebuilds them into gorgeous images of beauty, redemption, and repair. Then, and only then, are we ready to experience the dark revelations she has in store for them.

The Scamp is knife and velvet, tongue and bone. Its pages smell of pool water, trailer sex, and huffed gasoline; they taste of reservation cigarettes and peaches from the can. Jennifer Pashley tells the brutal, elegiac story of two girls on the move: broken, burning, and so dangerously beautiful. --Dylan Landis, author of Rainey Royal

Jennifer Pashley is the author of two short story collections, States, and The Conjurer, and a novel, The Scamp. Her stories have appeared widely, in journals like Mississippi Review, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and she has been awarded the Red Hen Prize for Fiction, the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT Fiction.