Blog Tour: Dagger Hill by Devon Taylor (Interview + Giveaway!)

Happy Thursday and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for DAGGER HILL! I’m so excited because today I have an interview with Devon Taylor to share with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so excited to for you to find out more about it, PLUS enter for a chance to win a print copy!

Dagger Hill by Devon Taylor
Published on August 17, 2021 by Swoon Reads
Genres: YA, Historical Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Pages: 336
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Author Links: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram

It knows your fear...
Summer, 1989. Four best friends—Gabe, Kimberly, Charlie, and Sonya—are preparing for their last summer together before senior year, after which they’ll all be splitting up to start college in different parts of the country. They make a promise to always find their way back to each other, no matter how far away from their sleepy Pennsylvania hometown they get.
But their plans are destroyed when a plane crashes right on top of their favorite hangout outside of town—and right on top of them.
In the catastrophic aftermath of the incident, Gabe, Sonya and Charlie are plagued by eerie visions and messages from an unknown watcher. They soon realize that the plane crash was no accident, and now they are being hunted by a sinister presence. And everyone is still searching for Kimberly, who has been missing ever since Gabe saw somebody wearing a gas mask carry her out of the woods the day the sky fell down on them...

What would you do if you spent the day with Gabe, Kimberly, Charlie, and Sonya? Where would you go to eat, hang out, relax, etc.?

That would be a total blast, first of all. I’d especially like to hang with Charlie. But if I was hanging out with all four of them, I’d take them to my local diner and see if they thought the food stacked up against the food at the King Street Diner in Windale. We’d catch a showing of Back to the Future at one of the historic theaters in my area. We’d probably go find some woods to get lost in. And I’d definitely have to put up with them yelling at me for all the chaos I put them through in the book.

If Gabe, Kimberly, Charlie, and Sonya were to hang out with characters from other books, who would they be and why?

Ooh this is a good question. If I can pick any book, I’d love to see the four of them mingle with the Losers Club kids from IT. There’s a little bit of an age gap, but both sets would have some killer monster stories to swap.

If there was one fictional place you could travel to for a day, where would it be and why?

Hmmmmm, I’m going to take a loophole here and say I’d love to travel to the Magic Tree House from Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series. One, because those books are what made me want to be a writer in the first place. And two, because the Magic Tree House can theoretically take me to any other fictional place that I want.

If you could meet any fictional character, who would it be and what would you talk about?

These are great questions. This one is especially hard because there are literally hundreds of characters I’d love to meet. But I think I’d have to go with Han Solo. The only thing I’d ask him is if he did, in fact, shoot first.

If you buried a time capsule with three items inside, what three items would you choose and why?

I’d have to go with a copy of Dagger Hill, a copy of Underoath’s Lost in the Sound of Separation album, and a notebook full of musings on the world as it is right now and how we are hopefully doing better by the time the capsule is opened.

What was your favorite bit of research you ended up not using?

I actually think I kept most of the research I did in the book. Most of what I researched was just for chronological accuracy (since I was not alive in 1989, I didn’t know any of the exact dates for things). But in the original draft, we followed some of the characters into adulthood. One of them in particular ends up getting a job at a company called America Online right as it’s getting started, before it becomes better known as AOL. I scrapped that whole part of the book, so the AOL reference went with it.

What is your favorite quote, scene, or moment from Dagger Hill?

There’s a quiet scene with Gabe and Sonya toward the middle(ish) of the book that was one of the only things to survive completely intact from the first draft to the second. It’s a scene I toiled over for a long time because of its subject matter, but it’s one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever written.

Enter here for a chance to win a print copy of Dagger Hill by Devon Taylor!

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What do you think about Dagger Hill? Have you added it to your tbr yet? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!