C.J. Leede arrived with Maeve Fly in 2022, a debut that treated Los Angeles as both playground and abattoir, and she did not tiptoe into the genre so much as kick the door off its hinges. The novel, a blood-smeared love letter to American excess and performance, earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination, won the Splatterpunk Award for Best Novel, and took home a Golden Poppy Award, all while racking up a fervent readership that couldn’t look away.

Her follow-up, American Rapture (2024), proved that range was the point: a sprawling, apocalyptic road novel that weaponised religious trauma and the betrayals of the body with equal ferocity. Both books established Leede as a transgressive horror author who refuses to flinch, and they left fans ravenous for whatever came next.

Now, with her third novel Headlights drawing close, the landscape shifts once more. If Maeve Fly was a postcard from the underbelly of a city that eats its dreamers, and American Rapture a howl across a collapsing heartland, then Headlights is a desolate roadside motel sign flickering in a Colorado snowstorm, promising refuge but delivering only ghosts.

The interview that follows is a long, searching conversation about loss, the male gaze in horror, the limits of transgressive fiction, and why a car can feel like both sanctuary and cage. It is also a map of an artist determined to build a career that refuses easy categorisation, one that invites every reader to find themselves somewhere inside the dark. Handing the floor over to C.J. Leede feels less like an introduction and more like stepping aside so the headlights can sweep across whatever’s waiting up ahead.

C.J. Leede Interview: On Headlights, Grief, and the Haunted Open Road

Maeve Fly is a novel of claustrophobia, a descent into the contained, performative nightmare of Los Angeles and the self. Headlights feels, by its title and premise, like a radical inversion: a novel of the open road, of exposure, of the vast, terrifying emptiness of the American landscape. Was this shift from interior to exterior a conscious act of creative opposition, or did the thematic concerns of the new novel organically demand a new kind of spatial and psychological geography?

I would say a bit of both probably! But mostly it’s maybe that my life has always been a bit nomadic, but when I wrote Maeve I was mostly stuck at home during Covid. I had moved to LA and felt a little trapped by my decision (even though in the course of writing the book I would grow to deeply love the city).

With Headlights, I was in a moment in my life in which I felt I was stumbling around in the dark, dealing with grief and a lot of uncertainty, which seemed to go on forever, and the open landscape of Colorado winter night felt right for that. The west is very expansive, as are all the questions we have about mortality and existence. 

Your protagonists exist in a uniquely American tradition of the outsider. Maeve is a product of myth-making, performance, and urban decay; the unnamed protagonist (Sophie!) of American Rapture is forged by religious isolation and the body’s betrayal. Who is the central figure in Headlights, and how does he complete or complicate the “trilogy” of American alienation you seem to be building? What new facet of the American experience does he allow you to dissect that the previous two couldn’t? 

Daniel Stansfield is tortured, sensitive, sweet, and male. I could see some readers saying he’s a departure for me (mostly for the fact that he’s a man), but really he’s just another human being grappling with this whole mortality business, so in a way not really at all. He loves the things and people he loves, and he’s very much himself.

This book has a lot to do with the differences between life in the man-made-world and life in the wilderness, and ways in which each of these worlds can be isolating or expansive, and what our relationship (and responsibility) is, and should be, to the wilderness around us that we keep making smaller every day. All that is present in Daniel, and at the same time he’s just trying to cope with his grief and a life of a lot of loss. 

Headlights employs the automobile, a quintessentially American symbol of freedom, agency, and escape, as its central motif. In your work, vehicles often serve as extensions of the psyche (Maeve’s controlled navigation of LA, the station wagon in Rapture as a fragile sanctuary). How do you subvert the promise of the open road in this novel? When does the car cease to be a tool of liberation and become something else, a cage, a weapon, a confession booth?

I’ve always loved cars for difficult conversations, both in fiction and in life. I’ve been living out  of a car basically for the last year with my boyfriend and dogs, and our relationship to the road has really changed. To me, the car is solace and solitude, but with momentum. It’s everything I love in one.

But also the idea of being trapped inside something moving forward, that could if you’re not careful get away from you, is a bit what this whole mortality and death business can feel like. We’re all trapped here on earth with everyone else, spinning round and hurtling through space trying to figure it all out. But we can work together to find ways to peacefully and sustainably coexist. Or we can choose not to. And I think that’s really what it all comes down to.  

The “final girl” trope is central to horror, but your protagonist seems to reject or complicate that role from the outset. How did you structure the narrative to subvert that expectation—not just in the climax, but in the very architecture of the first act?

Your fiction is unflinching in its portrayal of the female body, often placing it at the nexus of horror, desire, and violence. This novel is acutely aware of the way a woman’s body is perceived under threat. How did you manage the protagonist’s interiority to ensure she remained the subject of her own story, even when the plot places her in scenarios designed to objectify or diminish her agency?

A recurring tension in your work is between the ecstatic and the horrific, often within the same moment. Maeve finds a perverse liberation in her violence, and Sophie in Rapture discovers a terrifying yet undeniable form of freedom in her infection. Is there an “ecstatic” component to the horror in Headlights? How do you navigate the line between depicting a character’s degradation and their radical, unsettling empowerment?

Headlights in many ways is a much quieter book. It’s gnarly and dark, but ultimately it’s about looking inward, and sometimes outward into the dark, into grief, pain, fear, and finding the hope there. I’m not sure this one is ecstatic, I think I just wanted to find for my characters, and myself, something like peace. And that’s probably the biggest difference between this and my two others.

My first two books are each pointing out an issue, or raging against problems. Headlights is really more posing a question, or a few questions. What is death? Where do our loved ones go when they die, and can we ever reach them again? Do they even want us to? And since none of us can know for sure, the answer I posit with this one is just an idea or suggestion, one potentiality. It’s gentler, in a way, even though the themes are dark. 

Your work sits at a volatile crossroads of literary fiction, splatterpunk, and psychological horror. Some critics and readers often use the term “too much” as both a condemnation and a praise for your novels. With Headlights, did you find yourself leaning further into the transgressive, or did you feel a pull toward restraint? How do you decide where the “too much” line is for a given story, and is your goal to respect it or to obliterate it?

I can’t engage or concern myself with what negative reviews say, for my mental health, both as an artist and a person (and hadn’t really heard this criticism of my work until now). I read the five star reviews because it’s gratifying after working on something for so many years and pouring all of yourself into it to see the positive ways in which it resonates with the readers who love it, but it only ever makes me feel shitty to read anything else.

I just write the stories that feel honest to me and that say what I want to say, and I just try to do those stories and characters justice to the best of my abilities. “Too much” is really not something I ever think about. 

You’ve spoken in the past about writing for a female gaze within a genre historically dominated by male perspectives. American Rapture tackled a very specific, patriarchal religious trauma. Headlights seem to engage with a different, perhaps more secular, form of predation. How do you calibrate the depiction of violence and terror to speak directly to an audience that has often been the subject of such narratives, rather than the intended consumer of them? Are you writing to unsettle a specific kind of reader?

I say a lot of things, so it’s totally possible I said that! But I’m not sure it really is how I feel or what my general ethos is as an artist. I really try to write for everyone, and I’ve always just wanted my female characters to get to sit at the same table as the male characters who came before them. I want every type of reader to find and love something in my books, and I try not to limit my audience or cater to any one audience in particular.

So I wouldn’t say a write for a female gaze. But I for sure bring a female perspective to all my work, so I definitely write with one. But ultimately, I think issues that affect anyone should ideally be read and cared about by everyone, and I hope never to alienate any reader or keep anyone from my work. At the end of the day for me it’s really just about the particular story and the characters, and their wants and dreams, and about finding all our shared humanity. 

The American landscape in your work is never just a setting; it’s an active participant, the suffocating sprawl of LA, the desperate heartland in Rapture. What does the specific landscape of Headlights represent? Are we traversing the America of roadside attractions, diners, and motels, the “Americana” of it, or are we delving into the haunted, liminal spaces between those points of light? What existing works of American Gothic or road narrative did you find yourself in conversation with while writing this?

I would say all of it! Definitely lots of Americana and the West. But it’s mostly about the unknown of death. Ghosts, the imprints or memories of those left behind, and ways in which we try to deal with the crushing grief of loss and life. It’s about survival and also finding meaning, hope, and peace in a life full of loss.

Colorado winter and the Mountain West felt right for that for me. When you’re driving in the dark, you can only see as far as the end of your headlights on the road. After that, it’s all a mystery…until it isn’t. And I think all land and structures are haunted with what came before. There’s a lot of that feeling for me in Colorado, and the book is also very much in conversation with The Shining, which probably adds to that. 

Headlights is your third novel. Looking back at Maeve Fly as a debut and American Rapture as a sophomore work that took on a much larger, more systemic horror, where does this new novel fit in your artistic arc? Was it a process of deepening a singular thesis, or did it feel like breaking new conceptual ground? What did you learn about your own writing process or your thematic obsessions while writing it that you didn’t know before?

I really wanted to put out three very different books at the beginning of my career so that the potential existed for readers to each find their favorite, or one that hopefully really resonates with them. Maeve was a loud book to debut with, and I wanted to make sure I could pave the beginning of a career for myself in which I can write every kind of horror moving forward and wouldn’t get stuck only writing one thing.

I feel that even if nothing else, I’ve accomplished that with these three, and that feels really pretty amazing. I’m excited to keep moving forward and putting out a lot of work that explores a lot of themes, even if mostly (or all) within this particular American landscape. I think there will be a ton of variety in my work, but hopefully will all feel like mine at the same time. 

Finally, if you were to place Maeve Fly, American Rapture, and Headlights in a shared universe, not necessarily narratively, but thematically, what would be the connective tissue that binds them? Is there a question about America, about womanhood, or about the nature of fear itself that you feel you’ve been circling across these three books, and do you feel Headlights finally allows you to articulate it, or does it simply open the door to a larger, more complex inquiry?

I think it’s really human experience. For sure I’m using this American backdrop, as it’s the immediate world I inhabit and one I really love (and sometimes really don’t), and a lot of specifically American themes do come into play and I’m sure always will. But at the end of the day, we’re all mortal humans on earth experiencing love, loss, want, fear, joy, freedom, creative expression, life. I write about life.

About all of these things. I want readers to feel deeply when they read my books, and to laugh, cry, rage, want, wonder. Life can be so hard, I just want to create spaces in my books in which readers can escape, but also explore some of the darkness we have to live with in a safe arena.

And hopefully when they come out the other side, they’ve left a piece of something they didn’t have to carry anymore in the pages of the book, or they’ve found something in there that they want to take and carry forward with them. I want us all to feel this shared human experience, and I want everyone to feel welcome in the worlds I create. 

Thanks so much!! 

-CJ

Headlights by CJ Leede

‘Dazzling . . . You’re gonna have a hard time finding a more thrilling or moving book this year.’
– Josh Malerman, author of Incidents Around the House

An FBI agent with an uncanny ability to sense danger must hunt down a serial killer through the wilderness of Colorado, in this tense and gripping thrill ride by bestselling author CJ Leede. Perfect for fans of The Shining, Longlegs and Twin Peaks.

Every instinct tells him to run. Every memory tells him he can’t.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it’s happening again.

Seemingly 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. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.

Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along – before he and the people he loves become the next victims.

C.J. Leede

CJ LEEDE is a horror writer, hiker, and Trekkie. She is the author of Maeve Fly and American Rapture. Her debut novel Maeve Fly won the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award and Splatterpunk Award, and earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination. When she is not driving around the country, CJ can be found in LA with her boyfriend and rescue dogs.