Teenage Girls Can Be Demons is now out in audiobook!
Produced by Tantor, it’s been narrated by the wonderful Moniqua Plante and is available at all the usual audiobook places like LibroFM, Chirp, Barnes & Noble, and more.
Stoker Preliminary Ballot 2026
I’m thrilled to share that both A Game in Yellow and Teenage Girls Can Be Demons have made the preliminary ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards! They join a feast of incredible books up and down over a dozen categories that will hopefully be up on the Horror Writers Association website to share soon. Mid-February will tell which works make the final ballot as nominated fiction, but it’s an honor for both of my 2025 book releases to be selected. Thank you to everyone who’s been reading them!
Splatterpunk Award Finalist: Teenage Girls Can Be Demons
Absolutely thrilled to share that my recent collection Teenage Girls Can Be Demons has been nominated for a Splatterpunk Award in Best Collection!
This is the first time one of my works has been nominated, and it’s a wonderful bloody honor to join the legacy of Splatterpunk Finalists. Congratulations to all of this year’s nominees!
In more collection news, we’re less than a month from the February 3rd release of the audiobook, narrated by Moniqua Plante, coming from Tantor.
Bloody Disgusting’s Best Books, Onward to 2026
One last post for 2025!
I’m so excited to share that A Game in Yellow is back in Bloody Disgusting, this time for “The Best Horror Books of 2025”, joining a fantastic assembly of new horror from this year, some of them favorites of mine, others I’m still eager to read.
“Perhaps the gutsiest conceptual leap from a major horror writer this year, Hailey Piper’s latest novel is a riff on Robert W. Chambers’ revered collection The King in Yellow, a foundational weird fiction book that gets an unexpected expansion through A Game in Yellow. The book follows a lesbian couple in a BDSM relationship whose limits are tested when they read pages from a mysterious play that’s said to drive you mad, and even beyond the ties to cosmic horror history, it’s a phenomenal showcase in character study from one of the best horror writers working right now.”
And that’s a wrap on 2025 for me. 2026 is shaping up to be a busy new year, with lots of events, and more releases to come.
January 23-25: MystiCon in Roanoke, VA
February 3: Teenage Girls Can Be Demons releases in audiobook
March 3: No Gods for Drowning returns to print from Bad Hand Books
June 4-7: StokerCon in Pittsburgh
September 15: This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want releases from Titan Books
October: … it hasn’t been announced yet, but there will be another book coming. Stay tuned!
Have a Happy New Year!
Library Journal Best Books 2025
I’m delighted to share that both A Game in Yellow and Teenage Girls Can Be Demons have made the Library Journal Best Books 2025 list along with many wonderful books of horror. This was an enormous year for me, and I’m so happy seeing people enjoying my new novel and new collection, both of which had starred reviews in Library Journal earlier this year.
Four Past Meat Night also released recently, however, the limited print run sold out before the boxes even shipped. It includes my new novelette “The Lie and Death of a Trickster God,” so if you can find a copy, there’s crime horror with dinosaur bones out there waiting.
That’s my final publication for 2025! A novel, a collection made up of 9 reprints and 4 original stories, 3 more original stories, 2 more reprints, and 2 non-fiction essays. I also attended more in-person events than any previous year.
BookPage Best SFF and Horror 2025
“You have never read another piece of weird fiction like this.”
– BookPage (starred review)
Just a small update to share that A Game in Yellow made BookPage’s “Best SFF & Horror 2025” alongside novels by R.F. Kuang, Joe Hill, and more!
A Game in Yellow previously got a starred review in BookPage, and I’m thrilled to see it on their annual list of Best of’s in speculative fiction!
A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.
Late October 2025 Update
We’re racing toward the end of Halloween month, but thankfully around here, horror fiction is a year-round event. But for in-person events, that’s a wrap on this year! Next place you’ll find me is MystiCon in late January.
But virtually, I had the pleasure of returning to the Books in the Freezer podcast. This is one of the best places for book recs, and I had a blast chatting with Stephanie about my recent collection Teenage Girls Can Be Demons along with talking about books and movies that fit the theme, coming-of-rage.
And with another release inbound March 3rd from Bad Hand Books, it only made sense to come back to The Bad Signal to talk about the upcoming return to print of my noir/horror/dark fantasy novel No Gods for Drowning, along with chatting about the new cover by Anna Chiara Stagi, and my recent releases A Game in Yellow and Teenage Girls Can Be Demons. Three very different books, so it was fun getting to hop between them in one discussion!
Also, my 2022 story “Hollywood Werewolf Conspiracy” was recently read aloud on Cool Zone Media Book Club, so give it a listen!
Lastly, A Game in Yellow made the Men’s Health article “The 52 Best Horror Books of 2025” alongside works by Jenny Kiefer, Cynthia Pelayo, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Isabel Canas, Stephen King, Stephen Graham Jones, and more. It’s been another beautiful year for horror, and it’s lovely seeing my strange erotic cosmic novel among these.
Teenage Girls Can Be Demons in Publishers Weekly
Thrilled to share that my new coming-of-age horror collection Teenage Girls Can Be Demons has a new and glowing review in Publishers Weekly!
“The diverse cast of heroines and genuinely chilling scares make this a winner for anyone looking for feminist horror that is weird, surreal, and driven by more than a touch of rebellion.”
The review also gives shout-outs to “Why We Keep Exploding,” “Unkindly Girls,” and “Thagomizer,” “Last Leaf of an Ursine Tree,” “The Many Sins of Clara Greenstone,” and the Blackwood Devil himself, “Benny Rose the Cannibal King.”
More good news to come with these 13 coming-of-rage stories.
“The Giant Footprint of Horror” in Why I Love Horror
A few days late in posting this due to podcasts and events, but I’m delighted to share the release of Why I Love Horror, edited by Becky Spratford, gathering essays from many of us horror authors on why we love the genre so much. I’m honored to be part of with my essay “The Giant Footprint of Horror,” about a certain giant monster and what horrors means to me.
There are so many wonderful essays in here, personal stories and studies on why we love the things that creep us out in fiction.
Becky also joined Alma Katsu, one of the contributors, in talking with People magazine, and they both gave lovely shout-outs to many of us in “Why Is Horror Having a Moment? Authors Alma Katsu and Becky Spratford Break It Down (Exclusive)”.
“Then there are authors like Rachel Harrison, Gwendolyn Kiste and Hailey Piper who take the experiences and rage of simply being a woman and use the guardrails of horror to create something wholly new. As a result, they are bringing so many women readers to what used to be thought of as a male-dominated genre.”
Teenage Girls Can Be Demons today!
art by Julia Lloyd
Release day is here for Teenage Girls Can Be Demons, my new collection from Titan Books!
It’s been a wonderful journey for this book, gathering up some of my most popular stories like “Unkindly Girls” and “The Turning” with brand-new ones like “The Long Flesh of the Law” and “The Many Sins of Clara Greenstone,” and of course the return to print my ’80s coming-of-age slasher, “Benny Rose the Cannibal King” just in time for Halloween season.
Available from: Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, A Room of One’s Own, Politics and Prose, Waterstones, Amazon, Penguin Random House
“A fierce collection of women-centered horror that explores the different ways in which girlhood and growing up can be terrifying but also empowering.”
– Library Journal (starred review)
“Teenage Girls Can Be Demons is Hailey Piper at her best. In a publishing world where the novel reigns supreme, here a collection is the only way to really get to know the multiplicity of Piper’s work. Harrowing, scary, and raw, most often all in the same story, with topics that range from the surreal, to the nostalgic, to the all-too-real. Terrific.”
– Adam Cesare, Bram Stoker Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling author of Clown in a Cornfield
“Teenage Girls Can Be Demons simmers and crackles with rage. More than just a dark and fantastic collection, these stories are a guide for survival and fighting back against a world intent on doing harm.”
– A.C. Wise, Nebula Finalist, author of The Ghost Sequences
“Powerful, wickedly clever, and deeply intimate, Hailey Piper delivers a searing and entertaining anthology that speaks to the female rage of becoming. Delightfully and thoughtfully drawn.”
– Dawn Kurtagich, author of The Thorns
“With a delicious focus on rage and transformation, Hailey Piper’s second collection offers up tales that are as bold as they are beautiful. From societal pressures to complex and intimate bonds, Piper’s stories explore multifaceted characters who are unafraid to be loud and vicious. There is a refreshing grittiness to these stories where characters deal with some of life’s harshest lessons. Piper’s ability to dive into the gooey substance that makes humans both fascinating and horrifying is such a marvelous strength. A demonically good time that you don’t want to miss!”
– Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland
“Nobody writes grounded cosmic horror like Hailey Piper. That might seem like a contradiction in terms, but read these thirteen wild—and wildly different—tales and get a taste of just how Piper can twist you into otherworldly shapes while still reminding you of your essential, heartbreaking humanity.”
– Nat Cassidy, bestselling author of When the Wolf Comes Home and Mary
Praise for novella “Benny Rose the Cannibal King” (included in this collection)
“[Piper] knows the slasher well enough to do something new and cool with it. Couldn’t have had a better time.”
– Stephen Graham Jones, NYT-Bestselling author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw
“I see your slumber party massacre and raise you a taste of human tragedy, a funhouse ride of plot twists, and a heaping side of gore. Hailey Piper has the audacity to write teenage mean girls as thinking, feeling, bad-ass human beings.“
– Joe Koch, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Couvade and Convulsive
“A good urban legend has a way of seeping into your bones and refusing to crawl out; Hailey Piper’s Cannibal King is certainly one of those that will be creeping into my mind, late at night and unbidden, for a long time to come. Benny Rose is an unforgettable terror, rivaled only by the gutsy teens who dare to go up against him.“
– Claire Holland, author of I Am Not Your Final Girl