From the Publisher
A PASTE MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED HORROR NOVEL OF 2024
“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, New York Times 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
“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, New York Times bestseller and auhor of Bloom
“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
“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 Dream
“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
“Sad, furious, hopeful and absolutely lovely.” Hildur Knútsdóttir, author of The Night Guest
“Weaving classic horror elements into a powerful tale of trans solidarity and the life-sucking toll of being forced back into the closet, Piper cements her place in the queer horror canon.” Publishers Weekly, starred review
“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
"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, author of Old Wounds
For A Light Most Hateful:
LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST HORROR NOVELS 2023
PASTE MAGAZINE BEST HORROR BOOKS 2023
THE LINE-UP 2023 HORROR BOOK HIGHLIGHTS
Thrillingly original. Piper deftly stitches threads of vulnerability, existential anxiety, and complex friendship power dynamics into a feverish, nail-biting, writhing-in-your-seat nightmare. A juicy horror tale you'll want to sink your teeth into, before it sinks its teeth into you.
—Rachel Harrison, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The Return
Hailey Piper's prose crackles sharply and thrums with the mesmerizing pulse of a passing summer storm. A vivid, imaginative, and chillingly tense novel, A Light Most Hateful cements Piper as one of the most spectacularly fierce talents working in horror fiction today. — Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
A Light Most Hateful is filled with mesmerizing language that breathes cosmic chaos, abandonment, loneliness, and desperation. Piper explores the fear of betrayal by those closest to us and of the meaning of friendship and loyalty in the face of disparity. This is a book where the landscapes are upturned and roaming, where memories come to life as nightmares, and beckons us with the question, what if you can control the act of creation and uncreation? Piper has fabricated a darkly glorious woven reality where everything might exist and unexist simultaneously. — Ai Jiang, Nebula and Locus awatrd finalist, and author of Linghun
Every moment is earned, every monster deserving of its time in the spotlight. In short, it’s a perfect primer for the beautifully dark world of Hailey Piper’s fiction, as well as a must-read for longtime fans.—Paste Magazine
If Neil Gaiman, Mary Shelley, and Shirley Jackson could collaborate, this stunning novel would be the result.—Library Journal, Best Horror of the Year 2023
The story twists reader expectations into knots, flipping genre conventions and connecting unlikely elements to make something truly singular. The result is an ambitious, genre-shredding novel that takes big swings and, improbably, lands every one... Piper’s prose crackles with energy and wit as it ties the novel’s wilder excesses together into a story at once comfortingly familiar in its themes and cosmically alien in its execution. — Publishers Weekly, starred review
A stunning novel that purposefully plays with genre conventions and centers love, even as it actively terrifies readers to their core, much like recent novels from Victor LaValle, Rachel Eve Moulton, and Chuck Tingle. — Library Journal starred review
It is completely wild, a little ridiculous in a fun way [...] and plenty gross, too. Buckle up and enjoy the ride! — Bookriot
Shades of Barker, Gaiman and King dance through A Light Most Hateful, but the horror is pure Hailey Piper. A devastating storm of unnatural origin? Check. A contagion of zombies infected with their own memories? Check. Nightmares begetting nightmares in a fractal convocation? Check. A friendship between two girls as opposite as they are alike, tested by fear and desire and destiny? Double and triple check! Piper envelops the reader in a tempest of terror from the first page to the last. It's as close to a thrill ride as you can get between two covers. Don't miss it! — David Demchuk, award-winning author of The Bone Mother and RED X
Piper has spawned a slick mess of family dynamics. — Polly Hall, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The Taxidermist’s Lover
Piper's prose will leave you breathless in this stormy, jagged little pill of a novel about love and hate and acceptance in a world gone mad. A furiously compelling and propulsive read. — Gemma Amor, Bram Stoker award-nominated author of Dear Laura
What has sprouted out from Hailey Piper's head is a fully-formed goddess of a novel, equal parts terrifying, awe-inspiring, and downright worshipful. I'm still scorched by A Light Most Hateful, even after closing its pages, blinded by its brilliance. — Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
A LIGHT MOST HATEFUL begins with a scream, and that's appropriate given you'll be screaming your way through this swirling, phantasmagoric, unpredictable nightmare. Escaping the suburbs has never been so harrowing. — Nat Cassidy, author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings
Hailey Piper has whipped up a roiling tale of horror unlike anything I’ve ever read. Like a bolt of lightning, this story will leave an imprint behind your eyelids, to be revisited and relived every time you close your eyes, long after you’ve turned the final page. — Scott Leeds, author of Schrader's Chord
With A Light Most Hateful, we should all be hailing the new Queen of Cosmic Horror; Piper firmly cements her reputation of being one of the most electrifying and commanding voices in horror. — Ginger Nuts of Horror
For previous works:
Eerie and visceral, Piper combines the supernatural with the deeply human in a novella that explores the many faces of horror, at once haunting and familiar, yet utterly new.
—A.C. Wise, Nebula Award-nominated author of Wendy, Darling
Hailey Piper boards a starship where the most terrifying part of the voyage isn’t the cargo hold full of corpses, the tentacled creatures that stalk the pod bays, or their mysterious, otherworldly master, but the depths of the human psyche. An intriguing blend of b-movie scifi and incisive, soul-baring reflection.
—Adam Cesare, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Clown in a Cornfield
With surgical precision, Hailey Piper’s stories slice through the skin, fat, and muscle of her characters’ lives, all the way down to the living bone and what is written on it. In terms of their prose. their wit, their insight, their compassion, their terror, these are the sharpest of stories. Read them, but be prepared for the cuts.
—John Langan, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Fisherman
Every story has this incredible balance of being dark and scary but also wildly charming! It’s magic…
—Rachel Harrison, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The Return
A powerful, beautiful horror story.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Readers ... will be in horror heaven with this mesmerizing, original, and breathtaking debut.
—Library Journal (starred review)
Hailey Piper is at the top of her game, literally machete-chopping through new territory
—Cemetery Dance
One of the best horror books of 2021.
—Rue Morgue
A voice to be reckoned with.
—Tor Nightfire
A veritable banquet
—Cemetery Gates Media
Bold, thoughtful, and beautifully written.
—The Future Fire
