Now out in all formats!

Maeve Fly

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

A provocative debut that is both a blood-soaked love letter to Los Angeles and a gleeful send-up to iconic horror villains, CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly will thrill fans of Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw and Caroline Kepnes’ YOU series.

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

"This is gory and brutal and beautiful and painful and terrifying and a pure delight."

— Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author

Praise for Maeve Fly

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

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

Daniel Kraus
co-author of The Living Dead

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

Liska Jacobs
author of The Pink Hotel

Incredible. Like if Gillian Flynn wrote American Psycho. CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly is a firecracker of a book that explodes in your hand before you realize you’ve lit it. Shocking, explosive, twisted and twisty, with pitch-black humor and razor-sharp social commentary, this book is propulsive and a must-read for summer!

May Cobb
author of My Summer Darlings

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

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

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

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

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

Gruesome and glamourous, Maeve Fly could be the R-rated origin story of Morticia Addams.

Ainslie Hogarth
author of Motherthing

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