The Gingerbread Girl is the story of Em, a woman that leaves her husband to go running…and ends up in her worst nightmare.

After finding their daughter Amy dead Em and her husband never managed to get their marriage back on track and one day Em just decides to leaves. And when she do, she leaves for her father’s place at Vermillion Key where she plans to run and by doing so also deal with the grief over her daughter. However, faith wants other things for her…

One day while out running she happens to look into an open trunk of a car parked on one of the driveways she passes. In the trunk she sees a dead girl and before she gets much further she’s knocked unconscious. She later wakes up inside the house, taped to a chair…

The Gingerbread Girl starts of rather soft and feels a bit like Rose Madder even though Em and her husband aren’t in an abusive relationship. It then quickly changes into a totally different story that is very intense and finds Em fighting for her life.

Personally I really felt Em’s panic and fear when I read the story and I must say that with The Gingerbread Girl King shows why he is such a talented writer. The Gingerbread Girl is a short story (23 pages) but King still takes the time to give us a feeling of what’s going on in the mind of Jim Pickering, Em’s perpetrator, and also tells us a great deal about Em and her background. The Gingerbread Girl is King showing why he is the King.

The Gingerbread Girl is definitely becoming a favorite of mine and I’m really blown away by how good King channels Em’s panic and fear over to the reader. What ever you do, don’t miss this one! It’s now out in the July issue of Esquire.

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