Bodies of Work

GOODREADS MOST ANTICIPATED HORROR 2026

Clay McLeod Chapman's BODIES OF WORK is a scalpel, and you cannot read this book without being reshaped by it. It is a rot-crumbled tale of human brokenness, clear-eyed and visceral, awful, tragic and somehow exquisitely triumphant. But as with all of Chapman's work: it comes at a cost.
-Chris Panatier, author of The Redemption of Morgan Bright

Ornate and remarkably intricate for such a slender book, encountering Clay McLeod Chapman's Bodies of Work for the first time feels both startling and exhilarating like discovering a broken relic of long-since forgotten art. A profane hymn screaming from the charnel pit of a blood-clogged throat, an obscene portrait torn from careless, withered hands-this novella is deeply subversive, absorbing, and original.
-Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

In prose both fevered and stunning, Clay McLeod Chapman takes us into the world of a tormented killer-and into the minds of the young women whose lives he steals. Colorful and haunting, Bodies of Work stitches together beauty and cruelty, madness and imagination, as it plays all our best feelings against each other. A compelling and brutal read that proves Chapman is a true master of horror.
-Wendy N. Wagner, author of Girl in the Creek

Fantasy and reality warp and blend in a pure Chapman product, where a serial killer's demented fantasies give bloom to creative carnage on the canvas of his victims' bodies. Sad, sickening, and weirdly sweet, Bodies of Work is an unflinching window into the horrors of one way too dedicated artist's demented creative process.
-Bitter Karella, Hugo nominated author of Moonflow

A beautiful, horrifying, and timely tale about the dark side of the creative process (and a frank examination of the artist as monster). Chapman is one of the most inventive voices in contemporary horror.
-Shaun Hamill, author of The Dissonance

In Bodies of Work, Clay McLeod Chapman offers a glimpse into that liminal space where the true horror within remains undefined. A novella that's fractured between perspectives, it warps and shifts even as it reveals. Dark, fecund and engrossing... unique.
-Bookbeard

The Purge ain't got nothin' on this.
--Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestseller and author of I Was a Teenage Slasher

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a damn roller coaster of a novel, the kind that leaves you shaken and shrieking and smiling. Clay McLeod Chapman has taken all that's troubling our nation in the current day and, somehow, makes it all more frightening. Rough, ruthless but you can still tell Chapman is having a blast.
--Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women

Clay McLeod Chapman is one of my favorite horror storytellers working today.
--Jordan Peele

[Bodies of Work is a] beautiful, horrifying, and timely tale about the dark side of the creative process (and a frank examination of the artist as monster). Chapman is one of the most inventive voices in contemporary horror.
--Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes doesn't just hit close to home - it's a needle sliding under your skin until you bleed, a rabbit hole stocked with terror all the way down.
--Christina Henry, author of Alice and The House That Horror Built

A profoundly terrifying, riveting, intense, nerve-shredding modern horror epic. With brutal insights into very real American vulnerabilities and the dangers that exploit them, this novel is the truth and a warning and essential reading. It's also wild and scary and everything a great horror novel should be. This is Clay McLeod Chapman at the peak of his craft. Brilliant.
-Rachel Harrison, USA Today bestselling author of So Thirsty and Black Sheep

Brace yourself. This novel is relentless and utterly merciless. Chapman takes unflinching aim at modern American culture and nobody is safe in this brutal, insightful apocalypse!
-Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Road of Bones and The House of Last Resort

This is a bold badass book. Chapman has seemingly grown impatient with the vague stances and topical hints that must naturally be found in some books of an era such as ours: here he lays it out, naked, in full, what he thinks, what he sees, what he knows is happening in the spinning world. This lens is flat-out frightening, not only for its relevance, but for how easily us readers see the same modernity of horrors in our private lives... By the book's grand finale, the title has been twisted so that it's no longer only a mantra for characters trapped in its pages, but for those of us too immersed in the story to turn away.
-Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Incidents Around the House

With Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Chapman isn't merely checking the pulse of America-he's tapping the vein. And trust me, there's blood everywhere. This book throbs with body horror and familial conflict and most notably, the sociopolitical nightmare we find ourselves in.
-Chuck Wendig, bestselling author of The Book of Accidents and Black River Orchard

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is an apocalypse of the mind that leaves no one behind, illuminating a world on fire that is too eerily similar to our own and revealing the cannibalistic nature of humanity along with the dangers of becoming like sheep-an eye-opening sociopolitical fever nightmare that you won't soon forget.
-Ai Jiang, Hugo Award-nominee and author of Linghun

Fabulously unhinged, this book is a hilarious and terrifying jamboree of modern-day horrors. Gory, chilling, and exhilarating, the book knows to relish its delicious madness. I haven't had such a thrill in ages!
-Gerardo S·mano CÛrdova, author of Monstrilio

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is the scariest book I have read in years. It's a book for our times and I can't stop thinking about it. A must read this year.
-V. Castro, Bram Stoker Award-nominee and author of The Haunting of Alejandra

A modern American classic. Clay McLeod Chapman's panic-inducing, adrenaline-fuelled epic digs its fingers into the cracks in 21st-century life and pries them open to expose the rot beneath. Daring, cinematic, funny, horrifying and compulsive in equal measure, this novel is akin to the celluloid nightmares of Cronenberg and Peele-like Videodrome meets Us. A vital work of contemporary horror fiction.
-Josh Winning, author of Heads Will Roll

Disturbing and dangerously prescient, there's the dark shadow of a world-spanning blight spreading deep inside the mottled heart of Clay McLeod Chapman's latest novel, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. A searing and deeply unnerving apocalyptic thriller executed with the true nerve of a master storyteller.
-Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Gut-wrenching, grief-soaked, the book perfectly embodies the panic of seeing the people you love transform into monsters. An utterly disconcerting mirror held up to the terror of our present.
-- Cassandra Khaw, USA Today bestselling author of Nothing but Blackened Teeth

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a pedal-to-the-metal, body-horror mash-up of The Purge, Pontypool, and Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up. Chapman has an absolute gift for the unforgettably, mind-saturatingly horrific, and I shall be sending him my therapy bill.
-- Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker AwardÆ-nominated author of All the White Spaces and Where the Dead Wait

Any Clay McLeod Chapman work is a superb performance waiting to happen but with Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, he raises the stakes on his own writing. This book reads as real and raw as a dark mirror to today's headlines. Tragic, brutal, and devastating, Chapman mixes horror and heart, to spin a profoundly human apocalyptic tale of what truly divides us.
-- Maurice Broaddus, author of Breath of Oblivion

Only Clay McLeod Chapman can poignantly illustrate the tragedy of families splitting in American political turmoil while simultaneously serving up maximum gross-out, page-turning, balls-to-the-wall chaos. This book felt so much truer than I wanted it to. It's devastating that I know every character, and so do you. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is supercharged, gloriously maximalist, terrifying, and disgusting. But mostly it's tragic, and hits much closer to home than any of us want it to.
-- C. J. Leede, author of Maeve Fly and American Rapture

In Wake Up and Open Your Eyes Clay McLeod Chapman asks what truly manifests from paranoia. When one gives themselves away to an idea what is really left? This novel is kinetic as chaos unfolds in this reawakening. This is social horror at its most compelling.
-- Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Vanishing Daughters

A harrowing horror experience. Like watching through a window as the world explodes, realizing too late you should have sought shelter.
-- Johnny Compton, author of The Spite House and Devils Kill Devils

A horror novel so prescient, it's barely even allegorical... just a notch or two above non-fiction. Clay McLeod Chapman takes the radicalising power of far-right rhetoric to its bloody, gooey, bone-crunching conclusion - this is a gripping, apocalyptic vision of Trump-era America that rattles along at a terrifying pace. Videodrome meets George Romero's The Crazies meets InfoWars. It'd be a delicious piece of mischief if it wasn't so chillingly topical.
-- Adam Leslie, author of Lost in the Garden

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a fever-pitched maelstrom of modern-day anxieties and terrors. It's the end of the world as only Clay McLeod Chapman can depict it: twisted, witty, absurd, horrifying, devastating, and suffused with a grief that things could ever get this bad. Or, perhaps more accurately, are almost this bad already.
-- Nat Cassidy, author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings

Surreal, hypnotic, unrelenting, profoundly claustrophobic, and an absolutely scathing sendup of the pitfalls of American divisiveness.
-- Keith Rosson, author of Fever House

A sickening indictment of modern society crafted into a horror frenzy.
-- Polly Hall, author of Myrrh

A scathing indictment of an all-too-close reality, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes doesn't just get under your skin, it slices all the way through-then twists.
-- Lindy Ryan, author of Bless Your Heart and Cold Snap

Bristling with uneasy energy, What Kind of Mother seizes you by the throat and never lets go. An ink-black story about grief, courage, and what we'll do for those we love.
-- Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial There's a moment in What Kind of Mother when a character worries that he's telling the story all wrong. The opposite is true of Clay McLeod Chapman. His lyrical prose shimmers, moving us seamlessly from one wounded soul to another. A good old-fashioned salty summer scare about the beautiful, terrifying power of belief.
-- Caroline Kepnes, New York Times best-selling author of the You series What Kind of Mother mixes Southern Gothic, a missing child story, and body horror into an entertaining brew sure to inform your nightmares.
-- Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts A tremendous, heartbreaking work of dark fiction, where the horror seeps in quietly until you're left drowning. You won't forget about this tale anytime soon. A masterpiece.
-- Ronald Malfi, best-selling author of Come with Me I'm not sure how Clay McLeod Chapman manages to be both tremendously tender and brilliantly hideous in What Kind of Mother, but he does-in this strange, poetic, and gut-wrenching portrait of parenthood.
-- Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse Another stunner . . . one of horror's modern masters. Beautifully written, deftly plotted, and completely engrossing, What Kind of Mother will get under your skin and take your breath away and break your heart and chill you to the bone. A profound exploration of parental love and loss, of regret and sacrifice.
--Rachel Harrison, national best-selling author of Cackle and Such Sharp Teeth What Kind of Mother is a deeply unsettling, oddly sweet book about what love can become.
--Sarah Gailey, best-selling author of Just Like Home What Kind of Mother is both a breakneck story about running from your past and also a meditation on loss and guilt. Which is typical Chapman, a writer who always finds ways to marry our real-life fears with crescendos of pure unadulterated horror. His writing is intense, beautiful, disturbing, heartbreaking, and this book is no different. First it takes you by the hand, then it takes you by the wrist.
--Gus Moreno, author of This Thing Between Us What Kind of Mother is a masterpiece-a beautiful, intimate work. Clay Chapman is the storyteller supreme, and I will follow him anywhere.
-- Andy Davidson, author of The Hollow Kind Equal parts terrifying and beautiful. Chapman crafts a folk tale that slides under your skin and burrows its way into your heart. Visceral. Surprising. Stunning. Not to be missed.
-- Erin E. Adams, author of Jackal What Kind of Mother will make you pace the room, reconsider your own sanity, and question the stubborn instinct to nurture.
-- Rachel Eve Moulton, author of The Insatiable Volt Sisters

Shades of Flatliners and addiction drama pepper this tale about a woman who learns her college sweetheart died of an overdose - from a drug that allows folks to see the dead.
-- USA Today

Trainspotting meets Requiem For A Dream, rewritten as an avant-garde horror movie soundtracked by Nine Inch Nails.
-- Esquire

A legitimately terrifying ghost story and also a thoughtful and smart (if grim) exploration of how addiction destroys lives, Ghost Eaters should make Clay McLeod Chapman a star.
-- Vulture

Full of great character moments, unbelievably tense hauntings, and an emotional core that runs so deep you'll still be unpacking it long after the last page.
-- Paste

A keenly observant narrative that, with a mix of body horror and just plain horror, plucks at the raw nerves of the grieving process.
--SCI FI Magazine

Rife with body horror and hallucinations...the narrative sucks readers into its dark, disorienting world. It's equal parts moving and gruesome.
-- Publishers Weekly

Chapman has created an experience so anxiety inducing, immersive, and intense that readers will feel like something is actually there, lurking over their shoulder as they turn the pages. A great choice for fans of A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Orphans of