I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell by Mackenzie Reed: A Paranormal Romance Where Hell Is a Corporation

I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell | Mackenzie Reed | Berkley | 1 September 2026 |

Clock in, descend, fall in love: the office really is hell, and Reed knows it.

Hell as a fire pit is old news. Hell as a company, with ticketing, a head office and a Times Square entrance, is a far sharper joke, and it is the one Mackenzie Reed builds her adult debut around. I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell drops a grieving receptionist and her demon-hunting boss into a corporate underworld for a spicy, slow-burn paranormal romance pitched at fans of Bride and Assistant to the Villain. Reed wants to make you laugh, then quietly wreck you with a thread of grief under the gags. Here is where the book earns its four stars, and where the worldbuilding trips.

I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell by Mackenzie Reed: A Paranormal Romance Where Hell Is a Corporation

There is a kind of dread that only grows under office strip lights. It sits between the meeting that should have been an email and the fourth paper jam before ten. You know the one. It is the slow sense that your soul is being billed by the minute, and no one will ever pay you back.

Mackenzie Reed takes that feeling and makes it real. In her first adult novel, hell is not fire and brimstone. Hell is a company. It has tickets. It has a head office. And the road down to it runs straight through Times Square, which, if you have ever stood there, tracks.

Here is the shape of it. Brie Benson is twenty-seven and orphaned. She runs her whole life from behind a desk at a life insurance firm. She has turned the filing away of her grief into a full-time skill, tucked out of reach of the strip lights. Then she stays late one night.

She catches her hot, buttoned-up boss Luke casting a demon out of Deb from accounting. Luke, it turns out, is the latest in a long line of demon hunters. Business is booming. The veil between our world and the one downstairs has started to tear. When Brie’s emotional support coworker goes missing, Brie does the only thing a grieving woman with nothing to lose can do. She talks her way onto the rescue. The target is hell. The transport is a road trip.

Let me be straight with you first, because you read this site and you deserve it plain. This is a paranormal romance with a spicy sticker on the tin. It is comped to Bride and Assistant to the Villain, and it has no wish to scare you. If you want a book to keep the landing light on all night, this is the wrong queue. What Reed wants is harder. She wants to make you laugh, break your heart when you look away, and give you a slow burn worth rooting for. On all three, she delivers.

Hell here is less a punishment than a business park. It has middle managers. It has a commute. It has its own dead-end nine to five for the damned who staff it. The idea is old, that a modern job and eternal torment are hard to tell apart. But Reed gives it a fresh coat by playing it dead straight. Nobody winks at the reader. The demons file their forms with the same tired shrug as everyone in your office. The comedy comes from how little she has to stretch to get there.

Brie carries the book, and Reed is wise to build her the way she does. She is familiar to the point of ache: the capable woman who has told everyone, herself included, that she is fine, just tired. Readers keep calling her relatable. I get the reflex, though relatable does a lot of quiet work there. What they mean is that Brie’s coping looks like theirs. She is no chosen one. She is a woman who survives by feeling as little as the day allows.

Watching that armour come off, one plate at a time, on a road trip through the pit, is the real story. Luke is the harder sell. He is the brooding love interest with the guarded heart and the awkward secrets, and he wins more on charm than on depth. That is a fair trade for the book he is in. You want him to unclench nearly as much as Brie does, which is just what a slow burn is meant to do.

Reed’s prose has the brisk, tidy beat of a well-run inbox. Each sentence turns up, does its job, and clears out before the next one lands. Then, now and then, a subject line stops you cold, and you see the grief has been sitting unread in the corner the whole time.

The comedy is quick. The banter between Brie and Luke has real snap, the forced-proximity, one-bed, slow-burn gears clicking just as the genre asks. But here is Reed’s best trick. She refuses to let the jokes crowd out the loss. Brie’s dead parents are not set dressing. Her grief is the reason she can walk into hell at all, and the book is sharp enough to know it.

The road-trip shape does a lot of the lifting, and it is the right call. It keeps the book moving. It gives Reed a reason to march her best invented horrors past you, one set piece at a time. It pins her two leads in the same small spaces until the romance has nowhere to go but forward. The pace rarely sags, which for a debut is no small thing. The catch is that a road trip is only as good as its stops, and a couple of the pit’s odder corners feel sketched rather than built. When the invention fires, the corporate hell is glorious in its awfulness. When it does not, you notice you are between scenes.

It helps to know where Reed has come from. This is her adult debut. It arrives after two young adult novels with HarperCollins, The Rosewood Hunt and The Wilde Trials. You can feel that training in the clean plotting and the drive, the sense of a writer who keeps you turning pages without cheating you. The step up to adult work is mostly a step up in register, not a full reinvention: the humour a shade drier, the romance let off the leash. It reads like a writer trying on a bigger coat and finding, on the whole, that it fits.

Where does it sit on the shelf? Cosier than most of what we cover, plainly. The demon-hunting boss owes a clear debt to Buffy and Supernatural, and the book admits as much. But the sharper line, for a horror crowd, runs through Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör, that other great office-hell comedy where the shop floor plan becomes a map of the damned.

Set it next to Horrorstör and Reed’s book is the softer, warmer cousin. It cares more about the romance than the fright. But it works the same rich seam: the modern idea that late capitalism has already built hell, and all fiction has to do is turn on the lights. If The Good Place had a spicier paperback sibling with a demon-hunter love interest, this would be it.

The themes underneath are why it works better than it should. Grief, and the way we file it to get by. The dull ache a pointless job leaves in a person, a life measured out in reply-all threads. And, quietly, the case that feeling any of it, letting another person in, is the only way back up out of the pit. Reed sets that against a genre that treats the workplace as pure joke, and finds something softer in it. The office as hell is funny. The office as the place a grieving woman hides from her own life is something else. The book earns both readings at once.

So. A sure, very funny adult debut that knows just what it is and mostly pulls it off, tripped up only by a mythology that now and then outsmarts itself. Read it for the jokes. Stay for the grief you did not see coming. And forgive the fog machine when you spot it.

Hell, it turns out, is other people’s paperwork. Reed just had the wit to charge you at the door.

I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell by Mackenzie Reed

What could go wrong on a road trip to Hell?

⭐ corporate hell vibes
⭐ only one bed
⭐ a road trip through the underworld
⭐ forced proximity
⭐ slow burn romance
⭐ the perfect summerween read!

‘A delirious, clever romp of a book. Best time I’ve had with a book in ages!’ JENNA LEVINE

Brie Benson lives life in survival mode, right down to her mind-numbing desk job. But when she accidentally catches her (really hot) uptight boss, Luke, performing an exorcism on Deb from Accounting, her carefully ordered world implodes.

It turns out that Luke is a demon hunter, and when Brie’s emotional support coworker disappears in a suspected demonic abduction, she convinces Luke to let her join his rescue mission.

The only problem? Their destination is Hell itself. And the entrance is in Times Square.

To save their friend, Brie and Luke must navigate a corporate underworld of monsters, demons and bureaucratic nightmares – all while growing closer than either of them expects. But as Brie battles both monsters and her feelings, she soon realises that Luke is hiding more secrets than he’s letting on.

Time is running out to rescue their friend, figure out their feelings, and save the world from an impending demonic invasion, but as Brie soon discovers, the longer you stay in Hell, the harder it is to leave . . .

An incredibly fun paranormal romance about a down-on-her-luck receptionist who discovers her uptight boss is a demon hunter when she catches him performing an exorcism after hours, and then joins him on a chaotic road trip through Hell to rescue their missing coworker, save the world – and maybe fall in love, perfect for fans of Assistant to the Villain, Bride, and Buffy.
___________________

‘Delightfully bizarre, devilishly romantic, and thoroughly playful’ ELLEN O’CLOVER
‘Blends cozy horror, dystopian stakes, and slow-burn romance . . . as heartfelt as it is unhinged’ LETIZIA LORINI
‘A wild, inventive, hilarious romp . . . Charming, sexy, and fantastical’ CLARE OSONGCO

And readers can’t get enough!

‘A wildly fun, chaotic, demon-filled road trip romance and I loved it! . . . Such a unique, twisty, swoony, hilarious ride and I enjoyed every second of it!’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘I loved loved loved I Hope This Email Finds You In Hell! This story is hilarious and dark, but so sweet and even emotional’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Funny, heartfelt, and surprisingly thoughtful’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews

Every feature is built to sell your work. We include backlinks to your website or Amazon author page, a full synopsis, and a universal purchasing link that sends readers straight to their local store. Add a large, engaged social following and an 18-year archive of trusted horror coverage, and you have a platform genuinely built to grow your readership.

Whether you’re an established author, an indie filmmaker, or a debut voice in indie horror, there’s a way for us to help you reach more fans. Explore our horror book reviews and horror movie reviews, then get your horror book or film featured today.