At last, it has washed ashore.
Today marks the release of my new novel from Titan Books, All the Hearts You Eat. A modern Gothic of hauntings, coastal vampires, isolation, identity, love, despair, and ancient cosmic secrets, it’s been a long time coming. I’m so excited for these strange seaborne blood-suckers to finally make landfall, from bookstores into your minds.
“Piper cements her place in the queer horror canon.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)
What really happened to Cabrina Brite?
Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries?
Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina’s death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina’s closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina’s death.
Because Cape Morning isn’t a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.
“Sharp but tender, delicate but bloody, tragic but triumphant, All The Hearts You Eat will curl cat claws into your chest and take hold of your heart. This is Stephen King’s It for a new generation.”
– Delilah S. Dawson, author of Bloom
“You think you know how this haunting will go, but you don’t. All the Hearts You Eat has a dark and powerful undertow, and it’ll pull you far, far out to sea.”
– Chuck Wendig, NYT Bestselling author of Wanderers and Black River Orchard
“All the Hearts You Eat is a secret spell, a starless sky, the chambers of a heart and the depths of sorrow. Hailey Piper grips us in this gorgeous, yet tragic death poem and life poem, in which we’re struck with the utter heartbreak of how when we are starved of friendship, love, and care we are turned into a monster. As beautiful as the sea and as unsettling as its destructive waves.”
– Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Crime Scene
“All the Hearts You Eat is filled with mesmerizing and breathless words that explore violent pleasures, painful desires, insatiable thirst, sacrifices in hopes of acceptance and belonging, scraping both across and under the skin with effortless lyricism—a novel with an alluring pull, like following a hypnotic trail, and by the time you notice how deep you’ve tread, it’s already far too late.”
– Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker and Nebula Award-winning author of Linghun
“Piper writes about the big, overarching things here – love, loss, desire, belonging – with the same nuance and precision she brings to this novel’s haunting, braided narratives. All the Hearts You Eat has the insistent pull of a fever dream.”
– Keith Rosson, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Fever House
“All the Hearts You Eat paints monsters from the whispers of the waves, scrying secrets from bittersweet death poetry. Piper examines with uncompromising force the ghosts we leave behind when sorrow is unclaimed by the sea but still eroded by its waves. Utterly haunting.”
– Sofia Ajram, author of Coup de Grâce
“Piper delivers not only a fresh twist on the vampire mythos, but a juicy reimagining of horror’s archetypal Dead Girl Story. This book contains an ocean of feminist rage, queer love, and trans resistance–and like an ocean, it’s as violent as it is beautiful. All the Hearts You Eat is here to rip a hole in your world.”
– Lindsay King-Miller, author of The Z Word
“Like Twin Peaks bred with The Lost Boys, unsettling and angry and still full of so much love and life. Absolutely made me a Hailey Piper fan from the word go.”
– Logan-Ashley Kisner, author of Old Wounds
“Piper breaks it all open, releasing the existential terror (both real and supernatural) into the world, but not without anchoring it with love and hope.”
– Booklist
“Sad, furious, hopeful and absolutely lovely.”
– Hildur Knútsdóttir, author of The Night Guest
This past weekend was the 40th anniversary of Wes Craven’s horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I had the honor of writing a retrospective on the whole series, “I’m Just a (Freddy) Girl” looking at everything from the nightmarish original, through the sequels, Freddy Krueger’s fight with Jason Voorhees, a little on the TV show, and the 2010 remake. I adore this series, and I had fun looking over its history and legacy. I was also cognizant of how different movies mean a lot to different fans and sought the positive in each, regardless of my personal opinions (though those are here too).
A bunch of coolness out this week!
I said it would be soon, and I meant it: 