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:
CJ Leede’s “Headlights,” her best yet, will crawl under your skin and then wear it. A gorgeous and grotesque beast of a novel, Leede fuses gritty procedural, shocking conspiracy and abject terror into something so completely excellent and astonishingly accomplished that I, for once, am a little lost for words. Tense, intelligent, gruesome, heart-breaking and ferocious in its pacing, “Headlights,” lays bare on the asphalt themes of fear, trauma, memory, relationships and grief under high beams. With blood under its nails and poetry stuck in its teeth, this one cements CJ Leede for me as one of the very best in contemporary horror today. I plan to become more unbearable than usual and will be forcing this down the throats of friends, family and unfortunate delivery drivers. If I am any good at this (50/50) then this absolute banger of a book is out today, June 9th from both the UK and US Tor Nightfire imprints.
We follow Special Agent Daniel Stansfield, who, worn-down by his traumatic childhood, deployment, divorce and loss of his parents and nothing short of haunted by one brutal case, is absolutely ready for a career change. As usual, no such luck. He finds himself back in Colorado, Denver because the killings have started again. ‘Drifters,’ return to consciousness covered in blood, a piece of hair knotted around their tongue, donning the skin of somebody they have torn apart. No cause. No motives. No cure. And for Daniel Stansfield, still no leads.
“Headlights,” has had a glovebox full of comparisons drawn to it already, and a lot of them are spot on. If you liked “The Shining,” and “Silence of the Lambs,” “The X-Files,” and “Twin Peaks,” then you absolutely will enjoy this book, and it most certainly will be for fans of “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Se7en,” and “True Detective,” (ergo literally everybody in the universe). That however, does this marvel of a book a little bit of a disservice, because for all of the influences woven into the DNA of this absolutely stellar novel, Leede’s latest is far far more than the sum of them. Alive and hungry, it’s consumed and digested what came before it, sucked the marrow from the bones of them, and become entirely its own wonderful thing.
“Maeve Fly,” and “American Rapture,” are statement novels, with clear condemnations of how women are failed, mistreated and constrained by society, the industry, and religion. “Headlights,” whilst still rich with commentary, differs. For all of its flaying and severing, twists and turns, this is a book about Daniel Stansfield, and no punches are pulled, we get the good, the bad, the ugly, the bitter, the terrified, the traumatised, the grieving. Modern fiction loves to promise a flawed protagonist who leaps off of the page, but Leede strips hers down to bare, shivering nerve endings- he is, without exaggeration or exception, the most convincing portrait of trauma I’ve read in years. For a man so haunted by so much unresolved, it is perhaps no coincidence that Daniel has a career out of searching for answers.
Leede’s prose and the atmosphere she creates are about as sublime as anyone who has read “Maeve Fly,” or “American Rapture,” would expect. The Colorado of “Headlights,” (as a man who has never set foot in America, never mind Aspen) seems to breathe, watch and wait. There’s John Denver and dread in the air, and as much as this novel is polished, well-written and plotted, it doesn’t feel smooth and comfortable. Yet still, you will not put it down. Inundated with jaw-dropping revelations, twists and turns that demand another chapter, and another, and another, and then the sun has come up, “Headlights,” if you ignore the supernatural elements, is one hell of a thriller, the suspense of it alone enough to carry the novel.
I’ll end on this note because I have gone on long enough. This (as I said) is a novel about Daniel Stansfield, it does not have a statement at its very centre, however, there is explicitly too commentary upon wilderness and pressingly, wilderness protection. So if, somewhat ridiculously, you are not swayed by the glorious cover art on both editions, the brutal mystery and broken man at its centre, the fact that it’s a CJ Leede novel, then know that for each hardcover sold in the US for this first week (June 9th-16th), $1 dollar will be donated to the Friends of the Front Range Wildlife Refuges, and now you have to buy it.
Friends of the Front Range Wildlife Refuges | ColoradoGives.org
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