Maeve Fly

by CJ Leede

Overview

Winner of the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award • A Bram Stoker and Splatterpunk Award Nominee • One of Esquire's Best Horror Books of the Year • An Indie Next Pick!

"This is gory and brutal and beautiful and painful and terrifying and a pure delight."—Stephen Graham Jones

A provocative and unforgettable debut that is both a blood-soaked love letter to Los Angeles and a gleeful send-up to iconic horror villains, Maeve Fly will thrill fans of slashers and the macabre.

By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess.

By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes.

But when Gideon Green - her best friend’s brother - moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet.

Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.

"An apocalyptic Anaheim Psycho." —Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House

Also by CJ Leede:

American Rapture

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250857866
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/16/2024
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	58,080
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

CJ LEEDE is a horror writer, hiker, and Trekkie. She is the author of Maeve Fly, winner of the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award, and a Bram Stoker Award and Splatterpunk Award nominee. When she is not driving around the country, she can be found in LA with her boyfriend and rescue dogs.

Editorial Reviews

An apocalyptic Anaheim Psycho, a guidebook to the dead spaces of Los Angeles, a Hollywood black mass, an occult ritual that cracks the earth, Maeve Fly oozes enough anguish, alienation, and angst to drown the world.”

—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How To Sell a Haunted House

“A firecracker of a book that explodes in your hand before you realize you've lit it.”

—May Cobb, author of My Summer Darlings

“Maeve Fly by CJ Leede is so damn good. Follow Maeve on a mad dash through an alluring LA that’s both seductive and soaked in blood. Highly recommended.”

—Richard Kadrey, New York Times bestselling author

“[C]ynically fun tribute to perverse literature, Halloween, music, and bizarro Los Angeles ... You can see [Maeve’s] pain and stand aghast at her behavior all at once, making for that moralistic head trip every horror fan craves.”

—Fangoria

“Our collective Hollywood fantasy gets the chainsaw autopsy it deserves in this deliriously indecent feminist slasher.”

—Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall

“Leede’s bloody and gory debut will make readers clutch their metaphorical pearls in the best way possible.”

—Booklist (STARRED review)

"Maeve Fly is a revelation. It hurt to turn these pages, but I couldn’t stop. Maeve is every beautiful nightmare you’ve ever dared to dream. An unforgettable read."

—Richard Chizmar, New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Boogeyman

“[E]qual parts trenchant insight and pitch-black humor. The result is a gore-soaked love letter to Los Angeles that fans of American Psycho and Samantha Kolesnik’s True Crime won’t want to miss.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Maeve retains just enough humanity to make her the year’s most compelling anti-anti-ANTI-hero.”

—Neil McRobert, Esquire

“This is gory and brutal and beautiful and painful and terrifying and a pure delight. Child of God has nothing on Maeve Fly. But I think they might be cousins. Just, let’s not let them Mickey and Mallory across the world, ok?”

—Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw

“I can’t tell if I devoured this book or it devoured me. Either way, it was delicious. A dark, disturbing, devilishly funny peek inside the mind of a murderer that also dares us to examine the darkness behind those bright L.A. lights. I loved every blood-soaked minute of it.”

—Josh Winning, author of Burn the Negative

“Full of glamour and gore, this genre-rejecting debut is unlike any I’ve ever read.”

—Jean Kyoung Frazier, Lambda Literary Award Finalist and author of Pizza Girl

"Maeve Fly is a real trip of a book, and definitely not for the squeamish—but if you’re able to put on your big girl pants and look the nastiness of life in the face, you’ll find something special and sparkling here."

—Tor.com

“Leede presents us with a delicious anti-heroine. Her biting commentary on modern day life will suck you in immediately. Keep an eye on this rising feminist voice.”

—Tori Amos, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter

“Leede is actively working every angle to disgust and disturb her readers, balancing extreme scenes with obvious dark humor and Maeve’s engaging narration. Obvious comparisons will be made to American Psycho, but this illicitly alluring tale pairs even better with current voices in the extreme-horror subgenre.”

—Library Journal

“Thoughtful, wild, frightening, and fun. Leede’s anti-heroine makes for a heroically refreshing read.”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

“A shocking, wild, and sinister addition to LA literature.”

—Liska Jacobs, author of The Pink Hotel

“Maeve Fly is one of those books that is many things at once: sensual, brutal, sly, joyfully unnerving, and a blood-soaked love letter to LA. But at its core it's a horror novel, and it scared the hell out of me.”

—Keith Rosson, author of Fever House

“Sexy and gory all at once, Maeve Fly is a feminist masterpiece.”

—Mina Seckin, author of The Four Humors

From the Publisher

04/03/2023

Leede’s bloody debut sends its nihilistic heroine down a twisted path in the footsteps of her literary idol, Patrick Bateman. Maeve Fly leads a split-life between her day job as a princess at a cheekily unnamed mouse-centric amusement park in Anaheim and the dive bars of the Sunset Strip, alternately fixated on her coworker Kate; her Hollywood starlet grandmother, Tallulah; and her own place in the midst of celebrity. When she meets Kate’s enigmatic hockey star brother, Gideon, the pair enter an increasingly twisted relationship and Maeve turns to murder, mutilation, and nocturnal perversions with no motive other than entertainment. (“Men,” Maeve muses, “have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason.”) Leede does an excellent job of anchoring the story’s more chaotic excesses in Maeve’s narration, which offers equal parts trenchant insight and pitch-black humor. Though the plot occasionally loses focus, it quickly finds its footing again as Maeve’s deteriorating mental state drives things toward a satisfyingly visceral conclusion. The result is a gore-soaked love letter to Los Angeles that fans of American Psycho and Samantha Kolesnik’s True Crime won’t want to miss. (June)

Publishers Weekly

04/01/2023

DEBUT Bursting onto the extreme-horror landscape, Leede wastes no time making her readers extremely uncomfortable, yet unable to look away, as she introduces Maeve, who spends her days as the famous ice princess at "the happiest place on earth," while her nights are spent defaming strangers for fun online and visiting the seedy bars of her beloved Los Angeles. She is also a killer, brazenly murdering people and hiding her crimes in plain sight, in her elaborate Halloween decorations. But when Maeve meets her friend's gorgeous brother, she begins to question everything she knew about herself. Unapologetically dripping with graphic sex and violence, this book would be easy to dismiss as profane, but that would miss the point. Leede is actively working every angle to disgust and disturb her readers, balancing extreme scenes with obvious dark humor and Maeve's engaging narration. VERDICT Obvious comparisons will be made to American Psycho, but this illicitly alluring tale pairs even better with current voices in the extreme-horror subgenre, such as Michael J. Seidlinger, Eric LaRocca, and Hailey Piper.

Library Journal

Maeve, the titular character of this chilling audiobook, should have enjoyed a perfect life. The L.A. native, who descends from Hollywood royalty, portrays the lead princess at a famed Anaheim theme park. Narrator Sosie Bacon artfully brings to life the narcissistic young woman and her ghoulish dark side, especially her love of Halloween music and gore. As life batters Maeve with setbacks, including an on-and-off sex-fueled relationship with her best friend's brother, she becomes increasingly unstable. Listeners go along for the ride as Bacon skillfully shepherds them into Maeve's unhinged mind. Hint: By volume's end, it's not an enjoyable place to visit. Thanks to Bacon's stellar efforts, this audiobook proves both gruesome and gripping. D.E.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2023 - AudioFile