Description

‘Searing’ Observer

‘A blistering, unbearably tense read’ i

‘Wonderfully chilling . . . a delectable slice of defiantly queer menace’
Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells

There is something creeping at the edge of your vision, lingering somewhere just out of focus. All it would take is to let your mind wander, to let it come into view.

A young woman wakes after a house party with scratches and bruises – and a gap in her memory.

As the violent truth comes back to her – a series of events she struggles to name – her anger grows.

Solace comes in the form of enigmatic, captivating Helene, who knows what the man at the party did, has suffered at his hands too. An act of violence demands one in return and Helene is planning revenge.

But who can afford to ask for justice, when the cost is murderously high?

‘A brilliant, chilling, furious novel. Real, relatable, and unputdownable’
Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions

‘A brutal, blistering horror story about precarious lives. Part Eileen, part Carrie. I gulped it down’
Clare Pollard, author of Delphi

Publisher Review

Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime — Kim Addonizio A brilliant, chilling, furious novel. Real, relatable, and unputdownable — Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions A brutal, blistering horror story about precarious lives. Part Eileen, part Carrie. I gulped it down — Clare Pollard, author of Delphi Dead Animals is a novel about peripheries: the thing flickering at the corner of your vision, which is also the corner you can’t get yourself out of without the buoyancy aid of money, class and privilege . . . This novel makes livid the faultlines of power, in gripping, distinctive prose — Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place Dead Animals sinks its teeth into you on the first page and doesn’t let go for the duration. Stuckes writes equally vividly on the traumas of love and abuse, the indignities of restaurant work and the off-kilter beauty of feeling forever out of place, half understood. A pitch-dark, pitch-perfect literary horror, haunted by a righteous anger that spirals out into the world indefinitely — Luke Kennard, author of The Transition Dead Animals is creepy, claustrophobic and deeply unsettling. The prose is razor-sharp and the overall effect is intoxicating. — Kylie Whitehead, author of Absorbed I devoured it. It’s sparse, haunting and gripping — Cecilia Knapp, author of Pig Peach