Night Beast

A debut collection of doomed love stories and twisted fairytales “perfect for fans of Kelly Link and of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties” (Booklist).

In Night Beasts, author Ruth Joffre explores the lives of women—particularly queer women and mothers—and reveals the monsters lurking in our daily lives: the madness, isolation, betrayals, and regrets that arise as we seek human connection. Joffre takes readers to places where the sun never sets, where cornfields rustle ominously, and sleepwalkers prowl the night. In “Weekend,” the lead actors of an avant-garde television show begin to confuse their characters’ identities with their own; in “Go West, and Grow Up,” a young girl living in a car with her mother is forced to shed her innocence too soon; and in “Safekeeping,” a woman trapped inside a futuristic safehouse gradually unravels as she waits for her lover, who may never return.

“A cri de coeur for sympathy and understanding,” Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age—and growing old—as an outsider (Publishers Weekly).