Delicious Monsters

Via dual perspectives told a decade apart, two Black teens strive to uncover the secrets of a haunted house in this gripping psychological thriller by Sambury (Blood Like Fate). The house that 17-year-old Daisy’s late uncle left to her and her mother seemed to represent an answer to the family’s financial struggles, an escape from Daisy’s persistent visions of macabre ghosts, and a fresh start from her physically and emotionally abusive 21-year-old boyfriend, who recently dumped her without warning. But there is something sinister about their new home, and Daisy’s mother seems to know more about it than she’s letting on before tragedy strikes. Ten years later, the house is an AirBnB with a cult following that was spearheaded by college student Brittney’s emotionally abusive bestselling author mother, who claims her stay at the house—dubbed the Miracle Mansion—“changed her for the better.” But Brittney wants to expose it for the “house of horrors” she believes it is by uncovering its history for her investigative web show, Haunted. Using speculative elements to cultivate genuinely terrifying scares whose perpetrators straddle the line between imagined and real-life monsters, Sambury empathetically highlights cycles of abuse, depression, and generational trauma. Ages 14–up. Agent: Kristy Hunter, Knight Agency. (Feb.)