Black Flame

GOODREADS READERS' MOST ANTICIPATED HORROR BOOKS 2025 PASTE MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED HORROR BOOKS 2025

Queasily compelling horror.
-Guardian

As horrible as it is horny-Fangoria

Black Flame is a literary razor blade raked right over the reader's eyeballs, Un Chien Adalouing the shit out us with nearly every page. Gretchen Felker-Martin is ready for her close-up, and this book further testifies to her blood red reign as horror's enfant terrible.
-Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes

Consistently hypnotic. An intimate and insidious presence lurks within each page. Black Flame is a captivating grungy nightmare seated proudly alongside classics of its kind like Koja's The Cipher. Exactly the kind of feel-bad book to fall in love with.
-Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of All the Hearts You Eat

Nasty, erotic, kinky, vicious, suspenseful: these are just a few words that come to mind when reading Black Flame. Gretchen Felker-Martin uses the trope of the cursed movie and creates something utterly unique that manages to horrify, beguile, and empower in equal measure. If you are going to read one horror novella this year, make it this one.
-Johanna Van Veen, author of My Darling Dreadful Thing

Black Flame is depraved, shocking, and devastatingly beautiful. A hypnotic cosmic horror journey that travels both outward and in, pushing through the viscera and slime to reveal something truly profound about the nature of art itself.
-Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Bury Your Gays

Deliciously nasty, vicious and erotic-Booklist (STARRED review)

Felker-Martin's stunning prose is equal parts grotesque and lyrical as she turns an unflinching gaze on the extremes of compulsion and desire on the way to a truly devastating climax. The story threads the difficult needle of presenting unsympathetic characters and complicated relationships without compromising its vision, and the results are spectacular.
-Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)

Praise for Cuckoo

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A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Cuckoo is, like Felker-Martin's previous novel Manhunt, absolutely masterful. It is gory and horrifying and brash. It is a parable slicked with blood and viscera. It is a condemnation of the ways the world tries to force queer people to become shadows of themselves by abandoning who they are. This book will leave you gasping and yearning, and it will stay on your mind long after you turn the last page.
-ROXANE GAY, New York Times bestselling author of The Bad Feminist

Cuckoo is a breathtaking novel of body horror; a heartbreaking, angry, terrifying, unflinching indictment of Christian America's cruelty; and it's a soaring, boundless ode to queer survival. It's flat-out mesmerizing.
-PAUL TREMBLAY, author of The Pallbearers Club

Cuckoo is a cry of grief and rage and, at its heart, a tribute to the queers who cup their hands around the guttering flame of hope and refuse to let it die. Brutal, relentless, terrifying, startlingly beautiful-I dare you to put this novel down.
-CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of Her Body and Other Parties

Beyond being just a really fucking good horror novel, Cuckoo is monumentally important. Felker-Martin wrote a gut-twisting banger of a book that makes fleshy the anti-trans movement.
-CHELSEA G. SUMMERS, author of A Certain Hunger

Tense and frighteningly visceral, Cuckoo is a masterwork of body horror thrumming with the high octane viciousness of a Richard Laymon novel while maintaining the literary sophistication of a piece penned by Clive Barker or Poppy Z. Brite.
-ERIC LAROCCA, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Vividly gruesome and carefully observed, Cuckoo will be splattered across the inside of your skull long after you've set it down. Beneath the viscera and relentless prose, a vital heart beats within.
-ANDREW F. SULLIVAN, author of The Marigold

An instantly absorbing battle cry. Felker-Martin nests seamless psychic links with Lisa Tuttle and Stephen King, forming her unique nightmarish bear trap and fighting it with sustained, justified rage. Through all of Cuckoo's visceral brutality, it's the moments of kindness and bravery that broke my heart.
-HAILEY PIPER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

Cuckoo is vile, repulsive, putrid, and utterly without restraint-a relentless assault on the senses. I devoured every word, and they devoured me. Filthy, degenerate art at its finest.
-HIRON ENNES, author of Leech

This vivid, unsettling, character-rich novel grabs you by the throat and won't let go.
-LUCY A. SNYDER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Sister, Maiden, Monster

Cuckoo is a nest of guts so red and inviting you'll find yourself slurping out of it like pasta before you know what's in your mouth. No other author can make the beautiful so grotesque, nor the grotesque so beautiful.
-MEG ELISON, author of Number One Fan

I've been waiting impatiently for Felker-Martin's next book since the millisecond I put down Manhunt and I wasn't disappointed. Cuckoo is equal parts intensely tender and turbulently gross. Well-observed, enthrallingly paced, and downright brutal exactly where it needs to be.
-MATTIE LUBCHANSKY, author of Boys Weekend

Cuckoo is the gory, gooey, visceral horror story our present moment demands. It's an exploration of survival and loss in the teeth of interlocking material systems of violence like transphobia, homophobia, and racism. And it's also a radically queer homage to-or reimagining of!
-some much-beloved genre classics, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
-LEE MANDELO, author of Summer Sons

Praise for Manhunt #1 Best Book of 2022 (Vulture) A Best Horror Novel of All Time (Cosmopolitan) " One of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 (Esquire Library Journal Paste and CrimeReads) " A Top 10 Horror Debuts of 2022 (Booklist) " A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Horror " A Best Book of 2022 (Tor.com) " A Best SFF Book of 2022 (Gizmodo)