Charting the Horror and Beauty of America with CJ Leede 

Slasher novel Maeve Fly racked up the accolades in 2023 with the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award, Esquire’s Best Horror Books of the Year, and an Indie Next Pick. The blood-splattered love letter to Los Angeles was also a Bram Stoker and Splatterpunk Award nominee. 

The narrative follows Maeve Fly, who works at a very familiar theme park as every child’s favorite ice princess. Maeve also stalks the dive bars of the Sunset Strip with one drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating literary heroes from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Leede still loves this character so much. 

“Maeve was crazy,” she laughs. “There are a bunch of folks with fly tattoos, and I think some people just hated it and hated her and called it anti-feminist. I thought it was a super feminist book. For people who love it, I think it's because Maeve is a weird girl, and she flies her freak flag, and she loves her people, and she's very loyal to her people, in ways that are probably pretty messed up ultimately, but you know, she is who she is. And she loves Halloween. So she is for the people who like that kind of thing.”

Leede was querying two other books to publishers before writing Maeve Fly, but it quickly took over as a book that connected with her when she originally settled for a time in LA. The main theme in the book is people trying to hold on to things in their lives. “It’s this feeling that if you hold on tight enough, can you kind of prevent change and time?” Leede posits on the call. “ And of course, we know the answer is no, but I think Los Angeles is a city where we kinda try to ignore that, you know?”

Listen to the Spotify playlist for Maeve Fly here.

American Rapture transmutes the well-worn pandemic narrative into a blistering indictment of purity culture. When a mutated virus ravages the nation—reducing its victims to hyper-sexualized, feral husks—sixteen-year-old Catholic virgin Sophie is thrust into a Midwestern hellscape her cloistered upbringing completely failed to prepare her for.

Leede sidesteps mere splatterpunk titillation, instead weaponizing a deeply unsettling premise to dissect the psychic toll of religious fundamentalism. Though occasionally stopped by some theological messaging, this is a freight train of a book that is a blood-soaked coming-of-age nightmare with so much heart.

In hindsight, Leede looks back fondly on this novel. “I started American Rapture when I was 21 years old, and I don't know if I gave up on it…, Leede says. “I was doing other things, playing with it. It was in an elective course at school. And I took an apocalypse religion class in college, and I kind of was struck by this idea of like, what if, you know, in Dante's circles of Hell in the Divine Comedy, the second circle of hell is lust. And like, what if the sort of environment we've created in America around, you know, sin and shame culture, and also like a very sexualized, you know, world…if we created our own end essentially."

Leede finished the book when she was 31, and it was a unique writing experience about young and older characters with 10 years of learning from her life in between. 

“I’m proud of that book…and I think with every book it changes me so much,” Leede beams with gratitude.

Listen to the Spotify playlist for American Rapture here.

In C.J. Leede's “Midnight Disease,” the bruising terror doesn't crawl from the grave—it breeds in the nursery. The story is set in a remote cabin in Iceland. “That is one of my rare stories not set in the US,” Leede laughs. Leede mentioned the story was directly inspired by a trip to Iceland and also her own ups and downs with mental health.

Included in Mark Morris’ 2025 Fever Dreams anthology from Flame Tree Press, this pitch-black slice of psychological horror tracks a new mother buckling under the dissonant, crushing weight of postpartum depression. Stripped of her identity and paralyzed at a terrifying existential crossroads, her agonizing loss of self feels suffocatingly real. 

Leede eschews cheap genre tropes for visceral emotional wreckage, delivering a gut-punch of maternal dread that lingers like a bad trip. It’s a devastatingly bleak, tear-inducing descent that scars you long after the final page.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is the center of Headlights and is Leede’s first male lead for a novel. Stansfield is grounded down by his job at the FBI, but before he calls it quits, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago. A serial killer is prowling around again, and innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they've allegedly never met. A strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.

Leede was inspired by Longlegs and The Shining, and folk/country musicians like John Denver. Leede noticed a substantial difference in her writing with this novel. “American Rapture and Maeve [Fly] were kind of like me screaming into the void a little bit, and probably it felt good to hold on to very loud external feelings,” she recalls. 

When Leede finished those books, and they were released, she realized that her writing style was because underneath she felt sad and was dealing with grief or not dealing with grief. “That's kind of what led to Headlights was me just being like, "Wow, okay, I have to actually kind of sit with death now. And it sucked, but ultimately I think it's actually my most hopeful book, and I found some real light in writing that book that kind of changed my life.”

One extended metaphor in the book is the use of headlights or other types of lights within dark environments. Leede said that she pulled that from her life at the time. “I kind of felt like someone had turned the lights off in my life, and I was looking for this light switch, and I couldn't find it, and I also couldn't accept that I wouldn't be able to switch it back on,” she remembers. 

Part of that search in the darkness with Daniel is with a love interest, which culminates in a 20-page love scene that deals with far more than sex. “That was the one scene in the book that I didn’t cut,” Leede laughs. 

Headlights’ main protagonist is battling with his own demons from the past and maintains such a rich sense of character rooted in a mountainous region with its own troubled and storied past. Each Leede story is a mini ecosystem of emotions, and Headlights is reminiscent of kind of leap in quality Stephen King had during his prolific 1980s run of books. Also, long live John Denver!

Listen to the Spotify playlist for Headlights here.