Title: Maeve FlyAuthor: CJ Leede
First Published: June 6, 2023
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Pages: 288
Genre: Horror, Psychological Thriller, Satire, Thriller
Format: eARC, Ebook
Source: Humble Bundle, NetGalley
Rating:
Synopsis:
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.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
This book was weird in all the right ways, but also in all the wrong ways. I wanted to love it, and hated that I liked parts of it, but I also loved to hate it. Literary serial killers, female rage, and roasting Disney adults? Phenomenal. There is something absolutely delightful about a slasher princess that I could easily see on the screen of a summer horror flick. At the same time I found the experience of reading absolutely dreadful. Why? The main character.
Maeve was an unbearable narrator. She’s spooky and “not like other girls,” she is a “wolf” and she is obsessed with emulating literary misanthropes and blasting Halloween music. The number of times the words Halloween, misanthrope, and wolf was repeated in this novel was incredibly exhausting and I couldn’t help but cringe at how edgy she (and her grandmother) were.
Narration aside, the plot is decent, if inconsistent, and there are many parts of the book that are obscenely funny. Maeve’s dilemma is a good one, she has a serious fear of abandonment and she knows she’s losing everyone around her, she’s desperate to hold onto the people she cares about to the point that she pushes them away. She makes some decent commentary about how female killers aren’t allowed to be ruthless without a reason, but then contradicts herself by holding male killers up above female ones as truly deranged and not beholden to sex. It just oozed internalized misogyny.
The book rehashes scenes from The Story of the Eye and later American Psycho, which felt so bland and uninspired to me from a writing standpoint. There is a big difference between making a nod to other works of fiction and relying on it entirely, going as far as to spoil every major plot point of an entire book. The pivotal scene is clumsy, so clumsy I couldn’t tell if it was poor writing or if it was an intentional nod to bad horror tropes, and that’s a writing problem.
I digress, the high points of this book are very high, while the lows are equally low. This book will be entertaining for the right audience, but it will definitely be divisive. There were some truly good ideas here that I feel were squandered. I’ve been really mixed on my feelings about this book for over two months now but it was an okay first attempt. I’d be willing to give CJ Leede another try if she continues to write.
Quote
“Men have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About CJ Leede
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Austin, TX and New York City, CJ finds her truest home in America’s highways and backcountry. She now lives in California with her boyfriend and rescue dogs, and you can almost always find them out on the road, reading, writing, oddity-hunting, somewhere.
CJ holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School, where she studied Mythology and the Middle Ages.
In her novels, CJ is interested largely in Place, each town or city or state singular and unique in the ways they birth their inhabitants and vice versa. She is continually in awe of the bounty of strangeness, horror, and beauty that this country affords us, in all the exposed and hidden corners. Her true loves are deeply flawed loners and misanthropes, recluses and outsiders, those called to live beyond the confines of a traditional life. Freaks, monsters, adventurers. She is a helpless sucker for old dogs and “special” dogs, for dive bars, storms, cocktails, illuminated manuscripts, roadside attractions, and all things Star Trek.
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