THIRTEENTH is Book 2 of the Pagham-on-Sea series by C. M. Rosens. It is set in the Mundane Fantastic town of Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, England, but with some scenes elsewhere (mainly London, England). The first book in the series is The Crows and the third is The Day We Ate Grandad.
Plot (Spoiler Free)
Katy Porter starts the book as a Damsel in Distress; she's a 17-year-old runaway whose dad is a serial killer. She's off to London to live with her oldest brother, a 28-year-old insanity-inducing Millionaire Playboy who won the lottery and never looked back. Unfortunately, Katy's also the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child, which makes her The Chosen One. Her Creepy Family all want her dead, as she's going to metamorphose into an eldritch god and devour them all.
Katy is abducted from the train station by her Half-Human Hybrid Eldritch Abomination cousin, Ricky, who wants her to fulfil her destiny and take instruction from him. It Sucks to Be the Chosen One, especially The Poorly Chosen One, since she's too squeamish to kill anything without throwing up, let alone devour her own family, and Katy's life gets more complicated from there.
Meanwhile, her brother Wes has to work out whose side he's on, which isn't helped by his Addiction-Powered ability to see the future. There's a fair bit of tension between Wes and Ricky, as this is an Inbred and Evil family, and the cousins have a history to navigate and old grudges to work through while trying to help Katy control her powers.
Tropes in Thirteenth
- Addiction-Powered: Wes Porter, Katy's brother, takes designer hallucinogens that have a weird side effect: they help him remember forwards as well as backwards.
- Body Horror: There is a lot of gore and graphic descriptions of mutations and eldritch transformations/metamorphosis.
- Eldritch Abomination: This book is a Lovecraft Lite novel, and the family are human-passing eldritch demigods with powers and mutations they can mostly hide.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Katy wants to go backpacking and apply to University, but she's going to turn into an eldritch god whether she wants to or not.
- The Poorly Chosen One: Katy is destined to be an eldritch god, devouring her kin... but she's only seventeen, isn't as strong as other family members, has a weak stomach, and killing things makes her throw up.
