Maeve Fly

A USA Today bestseller!

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!

"This is gory and brutal and beautiful and painful and terrifying and a pure delight."—Stephen Graham Jones

A provocative and unforgettable debut that is both a blood-soaked love letter to Los Angeles and a gleeful send-up to iconic horror villains, Maeve Fly will thrill fans of slashers and the macabre.

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 of How to Sell a Haunted House

Also by CJ Leede:
American Rapture

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288 pages

Average rating: 6.76

55 RATINGS

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lulutripp

Mar 16, 2025

10/10 stars

I think I am in love with Maeve Fly. I donât know how I can read anything else for a while. My brain just wants to stay in this LA where itâs perpetually Halloween and creepy dolls pop up everywhere and all the decorations are made from real bones. Wow.

horrorbutch

Dec 11, 2024

9/10 stars

Incredibly unhinged woman as a costume performer at a theme park? I love her! Give me more!

Grolfe_77

Nov 01, 2024

DNF

Yeah, no. This was not for me. Awesome book cover, though.

KBenoit

May 17, 2024

6/10 stars

Well that was disturbing and heartbreaking

Hartfullofbooks

Nov 14, 2023

1/10 star

Maeve is a Disney princess that also happens to be a psychopath on the edge. She is full of trivia about Halloween, Halloween music, sex, movies, and local LA history. She is also a serial killer trying to hide in society. But once her grandmother’s health starts to decline and a new relationship escalates she begins to lose control. I did not like this book. Maeve was not a character I liked, could relate to, or was even interested in, nor were any of the other characters. All of them come as pretentious in the worst way with no redeeming qualities, I couldn’t relate or care about any of them. This book was very slow in my opinion with the real killing not occurring until halfway through the novel, and since I don’t enjoy gore or torture porn the entire novel was boring and I enjoyable for me. I had heard this novel was amazing and a must read and I could see that if you’re a fan of gore or extreme horror, but if you’re not I’d pass. Maeve is essentially a female Patrick Bateman, and the character even alludes to this in the novel in a not so subtle way that just, again came off as pretentious to me. I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone looking for a great horror read, UNLESS American Psycho was appealing to them (I also hated that book….).

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