A Light Most Hateful

Starred review from August 28, 2023
This surreal offering from Bram Stoker Award winner Piper (Queen of Teeth) blends horror, fantasy, and domestic drama into a fiendishly imaginative saga. After teen Olivia Abram’s parents discover her kissing another girl at a carnival, Olivia runs away from home to Chapel Hill, a claustrophobically small Pennsylvania town with nothing to recommend it other than Sunflower Mason, Olivia’s best friend and unrequited love. Then a bizarre lightning storm sweeps through town, turning Chapel Hill’s residents into violent, rage-filled zombies and spawning a serpentine monster that somehow knows Olivia’s name. Olivia must band together with an unlikely group of survivors if she’s to have any hope of making it out of Chapel Hill alive. Piper’s prose crackles with energy and wit as it ties the novel’s wilder excesses together into a story at once comfortingly familiar in its themes and cosmically alien in its execution. The story twists reader expectations into knots, flipping genre conventions and connecting unlikely elements to make something truly singular. The result is an ambitious, genre-shredding novel that takes big swings and, improbably, lands every one. Fans of Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always will be especially hooked.

Starred review from October 1, 2023

Award-winning novelist Piper (Queen of Teeth) returns with thought-provoking, weird, and utterly original small-town horror that is a must-buy for all libraries. Olivia, 18, lives in Chapel Hill, PA, the small town she settled in three years ago, after running away from home when her father caught her kissing a girl. Even though the town is not fond of outsiders, she has found her place living in best friend Sunflower's orbit. As the novel opens, a fierce storm brings torrential rain and what sounds like human screams from the hills. Olivia is working at the drive-in when an angry monster emerges from the ground, and most of the townsfolk enter a zombie-like trance. Olivia runs for her life and looks for Sunflower, trying to save them both, but what exactly is she running away from and where is she running to? Olivia is about to have the longest night of her life--one that will change her world forever. VERDICT A stunning novel that purposefully plays with genre conventions and centers love, even as it actively terrifies readers to their core, much like recent novels from Victor LaValle, Rachel Eve Moulton, and Chuck Tingle.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.