Part-horror story, part-psychological thriller, Delicious Monsters is a genre-bending tale depicting the worst kind of horror — the kind that takes root in your soul — and the terrible things people are capable of doing to each other.
“A haunted house thriller packed with cryptic mystery, dark humor, and bone-chilling twists.” —Ryan Douglass, New York Times bestselling author of The Taking of Jake Livingston
The Haunting of Hill House meets Sadie in this “genuinely terrifying” (School Library Journal, starred review) psychological thriller following two teen girls navigating the treacherous past of a mysterious mansion ten years apart.
Daisy sees dead people—something impossible to forget in bustling, ghost-packed Toronto. She usually manages to deal with her unwanted ability, but she’s completely unprepared to be dumped by her boyfriend. So when her mother inherits a secluded mansion in northern Ontario where she spent her childhood summers, Daisy jumps at the chance to escape. But the house is nothing like Daisy expects, and she begins to realize that her experience with the supernatural might be no match for her mother’s secrets, nor what lurks within these walls…
A decade later, Brittney is desperate to get out from under the thumb of her abusive mother, a bestselling author who claims her stay at “Miracle Mansion” allowed her to see the error of her ways. But Brittney knows that’s nothing but a sham. She decides the new season of her popular Haunted web series will uncover what happened to a young Black girl in the mansion ten years prior and finally expose her mother’s lies. But as she gets more wrapped up in the investigation, she’ll have to decide: if she can only bring one story to light, which one matters most—Daisy’s or her own?
As Brittney investigates the mansion in the present, Daisy’s story runs parallel in the past, both timelines propelling the girls to face the most dangerous monsters of all: those that hide in plain sight.
Liselle Sambury is the Trinidadian Canadian author of the Governor General’s Literary Awards Finalist Blood Like Magic and its sequel, Blood Like Fate. Her work spans multiple genres, from fantasy to sci-fi, horror, and more. In her free time, she shares helpful tips for upcoming writers and details of her publishing journey through a YouTube channel dedicated to demystifying the sometimes complicated business of being an author.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: Daisy
CHAPTER ONE DAISY There were two stories of how I was named. One was what Mom told people. Never casually. Only if they asked.
It was a dream of a drive long enough that you strain not to doze off, mingled with the extra-sweet tang of wild blueberries.
All of Ontario seemed to be built along rough gray roads stretching seemingly forever into the distance, where rolling down your window meant breathing in the sharp smell of burned rubber and stinging asphalt. The sort of tar-black road that scorched your feet with its heat and left the scent on your heels, smoky and stained, lingering in the air.
In this dream, Mom pulled onto the shoulder, bright emergency blinkers flashing on an empty highway. When I was little, growing up in a city, it was hard to picture a place I knew to be packed and busy, suddenly devoid. Like a ghost town. Abandoned. With Mom as its only inhabitant.
She stepped over the squat metal barrier between expressway and earth, careful with the swollen bump of her belly. She walked into the wreckage of fallen trees, burnt branches crumbling to white ash that stuck to her fingers and still smelled of fire. That’s where she found the blueberries. They grew in patches, short, small, and wild, alive in a field of death.
You could find the best blueberries after a burn, she’d say.
And there, in the midst of gathering the sweet fruit into the hem of her car-sweaty T-shirt, her tongue stained purple with juice, she found something else.
A daisy.
Inexplicably. In a place where only one plant seemed to grow was this other thing that shouldn’t have survived.
That was where my name came from.
Now, the second story.
The one where Grandma whispered that of course a sixteen-year-old would name her kid after a flower. Which meant that the second story wasn’t a story at all. Because that was the point, that there wasn’t one.
That my name was nothing more than a pretty tattoo: permanent and meaningless.
Fall is officially here, bringing crisp nights best spent reading a good book. We recommend settling in with one of our October picks: a psychological thriller about buried secrets, a mesmerizing fantasy about paranormal private investigators, a delightful collection of short stories about friendship and aging, and a fast-paced true crime story about a man […]
