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Headlights by CJ Leede Review: Horror at Its Most Devastating

Headlights by CJ Leede Review: Horror at Its Most Devastating

CJ Leede’s Headlights is the most ambitious novel of her career: a supernatural FBI thriller set against the frozen Colorado wilderness that fuses folk horror, procedural crime, and cosmic dread into something that stays with you long after the last page. Special Agent Daniel Stansfield returns to Denver on his final day with the FBI, drawn back by a case he never solved and a signature that defies explanation — people waking on highway shoulders, wearing the skin of victims, each with a stranger’s hair knotted around their tongue. Leede uses horror to do what only horror can: hold grief, trauma, freedom, and the afterlife simultaneously, without flinching from any of them. This is a review of a novel that rearranges something in the reader. Read on.

Jim Mcleodby Jim Mcleod•
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Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces: A Gothic Ghost Story

Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces: A Gothic Ghost Story

Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces (Tor/HarperVoyager, May 2026) is a structurally daring gothic horror set in an alternate 1975 Kowloon Walled City, where fifty-three-year-old triad ghost talker Mercy Chan is forced to confront a powerful new spirit and the past she cannot remember. Drawing on Chinese ghost lore, the real history of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and a bold four-timeline narrative, Dean’s second novel is a deeply personal, formally ambitious work that confirms her as one of the most interesting voices in the genre today. This is Jim McLeod’s full review for Ginger Nuts of Horror.

Jim Mcleodby Jim Mcleod•