Chimera

Gretchen Felker-Martin author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Titan Books Ltd

Publishing:16th Feb '27

£9.99

This title is due to be published on 16th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Chimera cover

The Sopranos meets Love Lies Bleeding in Gretchen Felker-Martin's Chimera, a grotesque body horror novel where a corrupt family of Skin Dancers can transform into any animal they've eaten. 

Centuries ago, in the dark of the woods, a pact was made. A gift was given. And the costs have echoed down the bloodlines.

The sprawling Varger family are Skin Dancers, able to shift into the form of any animal they've eaten, and they rule the 1980s New England crime scene. A late summer wedding between two families is meant to usher in a new era of peace among the households, and stifle the brewing tensions that threaten to boil over into war.

But something monstrous lurks in the forest outside the Varger compound. Something ancient, angry...and starving.

Praise for Cuckoo

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER A VULTURE BEST HORROR BOOK 2024 AN NPR BOOK WE LOVE 2024

Ingeniously scary... a great work of horror.
-NPR

[A] viscerally-felt horror novel with more than a hint of Stephen King. [...] At its best, Cuckoo is fast, bloody, and full of both empathy and rage.
-SFX

An exhilarating thriller mixed with a beautiful, uncompromising exploration of queer adolescence.
-Dazed

Ingeniously scary... a great work of horror-NPR

One of the most important voices in modern horror-Paste Magazine

If you enjoy body horror and care about stories of trauma being inflicted on kids by bad parents, you'll love Cuckoo.
-Interzone

Cuckoo is, like Felker-Martin's previous novel Manhunt, absolutely masterful. It is gory and horrifying and brash. It is a parable slicked with blood and viscera. It is a condemnation of the ways the world tries to force queer people to become shadows of themselves by abandoning who they are. This book will leave you gasping and yearning, and it will stay on your mind long after you turn the last page.
--ROXANE GAY, New York Times bestselling author of The Bad Feminist

Cuckoo is a breathtaking novel of body horror; a heartbreaking, angry, terrifying, unflinching indictment of Christian America's cruelty; and it's a soaring, boundless ode to queer survival. It's flat-out mesmerizing.
--PAUL TREMBLAY, author of The Pallbearers Club

Cuckoo is a cry of grief and rage and, at its heart, a tribute to the queers who cup their hands around the guttering flame of hope and refuse to let it die. Brutal, relentless, terrifying, startlingly beautiful-I dare you to put this novel down.
--CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of Her Body and Other Parties

Beyond being just a really fucking good horror novel, Cuckoo is monumentally important. Felker-Martin wrote a gut-twisting banger of a book that makes fleshy the anti-trans movement.
--CHELSEA G. SUMMERS, author ofA Certain Hunger

Tense and frighteningly visceral, Cuckoo is a masterwork of body horror thrumming with the high octane viciousness of a Richard Laymon novel while maintaining the literary sophistication of a piece penned by Clive Barker or Poppy Z. Brite.
--ERIC LAROCCA, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Vividly gruesome and carefully observed, Cuckoo will be splattered across the inside of your skull long after you've set it down. Beneath the viscera and relentless prose, a vital heart beats within.
--ANDREW F. SULLIVAN, author of The Marigold

An instantly absorbing battle cry. Felker-Martin nests seamless psychic links with Lisa Tuttle and Stephen King, forming her unique nightmarish bear trap and fighting it with sustained, justified rage. Through all of Cuckoo's visceral brutality, it's the moments of kindness and bravery that broke my heart.
--HAILEY PIPER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

Cuckoo is vile, repulsive, putrid, and utterly without restraint-a relentless assault on the senses. I devoured every word, and they devoured me. Filthy, degenerate art at its finest.
--HIRON ENNES, author of Leech

This vivid, unsettling, character-rich novel grabs you by the throat and won't let go.
--LUCY A. SNYDER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Sister, Maiden, Monster

Cuckoo is a nest of guts so red and inviting you'll find yourself slurping out of it like pasta before you know what's in your mouth. No other author can make the beautiful so grotesque, nor the grotesque so beautiful.
--MEG ELISON, author of Number One Fan

I've been waiting impatiently for Felker-Martin's next book since the millisecond I put down Manhunt and I wasn't disappointed. Cuckoo is equal parts intensely tender and turbulently gross. Well-observed, enthrallingly paced, and downright brutal exactly where it needs to be.
--MATTIE LUBCHANSKY, author of Boys Weekend

Cuckoo is the gory, gooey, visceral horror story our present moment demands. It's an exploration of survival and loss in the teeth of interlocking material systems of violence like transphobia, homophobia, and racism. And it's also a radically queer homage to-or reimagining of!
-some much-beloved genre classics, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
--LEE MANDELO, author of Summer Sons

Praise for Manhunt #1 Best Book of 2022 (Vulture) A Best Horror Novel of All Time (Cosmopolitan) " One of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 (Esquire Library Journal Paste and CrimeReads) " A Top 10 Horror Debuts of 2022 (Booklist) " A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Horror " A Best Book of 2022 (Tor.com) " A Best SFF Book of 2022 (Gizmodo)

ISBN: 9781835418918

Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 55mm

Weight: 255g

336 pages