BOOKS

Ghosts and zombies and paranormal activity—oh my! It’s Women in Horror Month, and to celebrate we’re exclusively revealing the trailer *and* cover for The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl, the third and final book in Paige McKenzie’s creeptastic trilogy The Haunting of Sunshine Girl.

As if that wasn’t already the perfect way to start a month celebrating women’s contributions to the horror genre, we also sat down with the 22-year-old author to talk book brainstorming, opting out of college and her unabashed love for pom poms.

In The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl, out April 4, Sunshine returns with full control of her powers as a luiseach, an ancient protector of the human race from dark spirits. While racing to defeat an army of demons with the help of her mom and her boyfriend, Nolan, Sunshine discovers a shocking secret about herself—a secret with the power to change the fate of humanity.

What’s the secret? Find out in the trailer for The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl below!

5 things you don't know about Paige McKenzie

Think you know everything there is to know about this sunshine girl? Think again! We've got deets that will surprise even the biggest Paige McKenzie fan.

Paige started writing her series at just 19
"I was 16 when I started the (YouTube) series and 19 when the books started,” Paige said. Now 22, Paige looks back on her 2010 YouTube beginnings, saying, “I wasn’t a big YouTube watcher, so it was kind of weird to get used to filming and uploading and doing the right tags. I didn’t already have a channel, either. Nowadays, everyone you know has one. Everybody is in a web series or watches a web series.” So how'd she get the idea for the series? "We did some reverse YouTube searches, and found out that ghost was the number two most-searched thing," she said. "So I decided that that would be a fairly easy, ridiculously-fun thing to base our YouTube channel on."

She's getting her own TV show
Sunshine Girl—which Paige describes as Gilmore Girls meets Paranormal Activity—is set to become a TV show sometime this year. If you’ve seen the web series and read the books though, don’t worry! “It’s going to be a third version of the story,” Paige told us. “Because the YouTube [version] was a slightly different version than my life, obviously, and the first book was different than the YouTube.”

Paige *loves* working with her mom
Paige’s real life mom plays her mom in the YouTube series and in the book trailers, which she told us was one her fave things about the projects. “I’ve always loved working with my mom,” Paige said. “She’s been an actor almost my entire life, so I grew up around this industry. I started acting when I was 6, so being on a film set is like home. Being able to work with her is cool. She has red hair and pale skin, and I have kind of darker skin and dark hair, and we look nothing alike, so we never got cast as mother-daughter duo. It was kind of my dream to cast my mom as my mom!”

She didn’t go to college
“Not everyone should just not go to college," Paige told us. “If you want to be a doctor, you should really go to college. You can’t give people shots and stuff just because you say you’re a doctor. But it worked out for me. I’d recommend it to people who are in the creative industry. Figure out what you want as opposed to having someone show you what you should do or want to do or anything like that.”

She has an Etsy store, and everything in it is totally adorbs
Paige told us,“I started crafting as a way of dealing with my anxiety. Eventually I just had too many things I was making. I was like, 'I don’t know what to do with any of it!' So I started an Etsy shop. I know it should be called 'Sunshine Shop' or something like that, but I chose a name not directly related to Sunshine just to see what would happen.” What’s her latest obsession? Pom poms! She said, “I have literally pom pom everything in my life. I even sewed them onto my shower curtains.” Don't believe her? You can check out her Etsy store here.

What was your favorite part of the trailer? Did you learn something new about Paige? Let us know in the comments!

Photo credit: Levy Moroshan

by Emily Cavanagh | 2/9/2017