Rare
Author: Patrick de Moss
Publication date: March 1st 2025
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Some songs aren’t meant to exist.
When sixteen-year-old Emma receives a mysterious Beatles record—a cover of The Girl Can’t Help It, a song they never recorded, her life changes in ways she never imagined. Grieving her grandmother’s death and lost in the heavy fog of depression, Emma doesn’t expect much from the strange package. But the moment the needle drops, magic ripples through the world.
Angels shiver. Dragons stir in their hoards. Vampires feel an ancient hunger awaken. The song calls to them all, and it calls to Emma too. For the first time since her grandmother’s death, Emma feels something spark inside her: hope. But magic has a price, and the Dark has heard the song as well.
To protect the record, Emma must venture into the Hidden States of America—a surreal, shadowed version of the country where myth and reality blur. It’s a country shaped by the stories we tell and the secrets we keep, where ordinary towns hide extraordinary truths.
As Emma struggles to carry the song to where it belongs, she’ll have to confront her grief, face her deepest fears, and discover if she has the strength to resist the pull of the Dark.
From Patrick de Moss, the acclaimed author of Kings of Nowhere, comes a darkly magical tale of loss, courage, and the power of music to heal even the deepest wounds. This is a story that explores the fragile beauty of hope and the strength it takes to face the shadows.
Rare is a spellbinding modern fable. Every note of the song of this story echoes with both wonder and danger. Some songs can change the world. Some songs can change you.
an excerpt
The best road trips were more like dreams than travel. Emma felt the time along the long stretches of road in flickers of light and shadow, in the music Scarlett summoned from a battered CD player that slid precariously back and forth along the dashboard and drummed out on the steering wheel. She felt it in the taste of a Coke from a warm bottle resting at her feet. In the smell of the road baking in the summer sun when they stopped for gas, and the smell of the gas station mixing with the road scent and the scent of the car seats. Sound, taste, and smell combined drove home the sights, the brilliant sights, and all of it together was the Road. The Road that wound its way around her, through her, piercing her heart with the wonder of all that was, to her, a New California.
Old California was San Diego. Old California was the trudge to school through traffic lights. Stop. Shuffle and smell the chug and churn of all the exhaust draining from the cars around her, then green light and trudge along again to whiteboard classrooms, to cafeteria lunches, and head-down-trudge back home again. She could wander out again after she was home, and sure, maybe there were trips to other schools in the San Diego area or playing at the mall in the summertime, but it was all still San Diego, and though it was home, it would always be the same.
But New California. New California.
New California opened up and went wider and wider and higher and higher and further—a whole country that spread out in front of the dashboard and all around them, a whole country in the dance of pines and redwoods and brush, twirling past the car in pirouettes as Scarlett and Emma flew on, chasing Gwen’s dust-caked white Golf along the freeway as the cities dropped behind along CA-120, giving way to long pastures and cows and a sun so bright and true it stung her eyes.
“OhmygodIlovethisSONG!”
And the Datsun would become a starburst of music, the rattling knock and gutter of the engine keeping time with Scarlett’s fingers hammering on the wheel. “C’mon, Emmy, sing it if you know it!” And Emma heard “Ballroom Blitz” for what seemed like the first time in her life, learning the lyrics by heart to the ticking, marvelous metronome of the Road.
She was baptized in the blue sky of the Sunshine State, she was blessed by the wind as it hurtled along and around them, and if there were tears in her eyes as they curled their way up into the mountains past Jamestown, through Monto Vista and Long Barn, it was because of the Everywhereness of it all. Everywhere there was sunshine. Everywhere was a place she could go, if she wanted to. The hurt that had clamped around her heart for so long, which had been loosened by the shock of the miracle on the record, shook free with the rattle of the car. Emma wept into the wind like a man who had carried a hundred pounds and more on his back would weep when finally he could set it down to dance.
Playwright, poet, prose writer, as well as former gravedigger, hotline psychic, line cook, chef, waiter and a few other things in between, Patrick de Moss lives and works in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
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