Synopsis:
Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it’s happening again.
Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they’ve allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.
Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along― before he and the people he loves become the next victims.
Review:
I found C.J. Leede’s debut, Maeve Fly to be an entertaining, goopy read. I liked it. Then I read American Rapture, and I’d suddenly found a new favorite author. A wild, messy coming of age story that looks like a zombie outbreak story and manages to pack in, well, just about everything else. Rapture is a book about ideas, ideas about sex and religion and place and, finally, about America. It’s a heartbreaking, staggering kind of book.
Headlights follows a similar trajectory. The set up looks from the outside like one of the darkest X-Files episodes never made, with an FBI agent with paranormal powers pulled back into an impossible serial killer case. Someone or something is controlling otherwise innocent people, making them murder strangers, skin them, and then walk down Colorado roads wearing their pelts.
Yeah, it’s pretty extreme.
So is everything that follows. The killings start up again, and our agent, Daniel Stansfield, finds himself not just back in the investigation, but at the center of the crimes themselves.
But Stansfield isn’t really in any shape to do the work. A roiling mass of trauma, he is haunted both figuratively and literally. And as the investigation keeps pointing back at him, he goes further and further over the edge.
Like American Rapture, Leede wants to talk about a hundred other things as well as this kooky plot. Everything from wolf reintroduction and urban sprawl to domestic violence, parenthood, religion, and the lasting effects of childhood trauma. Oh, and John Denver.
And like Maeve Fly, there’s a certain off-the-rails quality to Headlights. One genuinely never knows where the story will lead next, and that continues right up to the genre-bending climax.
Character-wise, Headlights is built around the deeply fraught figure of Stansfield, a dude with enough issues to power a dozen books, but the secondary characters do a lot of heavy lifting as well. Stansfield’s seemingly dopey partner (and his ex wife’s new boyfriend) is allowed to be much more than he appears, and Leede allows her characters to talk about things that really matter, even when the world is closing in around them.
Headlights gets bonus points for blowing the so called “discourse” around the need for sex scenes completely out of the water with one of the most harrowing erotic scenes I’ve ever read. Leede places this scene almost literally at the center of the book, and makes it central to the story’s unfolding.
Does Headlights hold the same place in my heart as American Rapture? No. Is it fun-gross-horrifying-fascinating-and mind-bending? Absolutely.
It’s also a document of a great writer refusing to rest on her laurels, stretching her legs creatively, and pushing, pushing, pushing. That’s a wonderful thing to see and experience.
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