A light most hateful

This surreal offering from Bram Stoker Award winner Piper (Queen of Teeth) blends horror, fantasy, and domestic drama into a fiendishly imaginative saga. After teen Olivia Abram's parents discover her kissing another girl at a carnival, Olivia runs away from home to Chapel Hill, a claustrophobically small Pennsylvania town with nothing to recommend it other than Sunflower Mason, Olivia's best friend and unrequited love. Then a bizarre lightning storm sweeps through town, turning Chapel Hill's residents into violent, rage-filled zombies and spawning a serpentine monster that somehow knows Olivia's name. Olivia must band together with an unlikely group of survivors if she's to have any hope of making it out of Chapel Hill alive. Piper's prose crackles with energy and wit as it ties the novel's wilder excesses together into a story at once comfortingly familiar in its themes and cosmically alien in its execution. The story twists reader expectations into knots, flipping genre conventions and connecting unlikely elements to make something truly singular. The result is an ambitious, genre-shredding novel that takes big swings and, improbably, lands every one. Fans of Clive Barker's The Thief of Always will be especially hooked. (Oct.)

Piper's (Queen of Teeth) genre-bending latest lulls listeners into thinking they're in familiar territory before hurling twists at them like lightning bolts. After being discovered kissing a girl, Olivia has run away from home and settled in the small town of Chapel Hill, PA, where she now obsesses over her best friend, Sunflower. Then an unearthly storm sweeps through town. Suddenly, Olivia's friends and neighbors turn into zombielike creatures, and a reptilian shape-shifter sets its sights on Olivia. As Olivia desperately looks for Sunflower, the town is visited by increasingly wild mayhem and violence. No matter how strange the ensuing events, narrator Jeremy Carlisle Parker's steady performance and emotionally rich depiction of the characters' relationships ground the narrative. Parker's narration is especially impressive after major plot twists increase the number of characters, some of whom could be easily confused; Parker ably differentiates the voices. Some of these characters might fool Olivia, but Parker will have listeners already clued in. VERDICT Throughout this intense blend of horror, romance, and fantasy, listeners will be glad for Parker's performance. A twisty, shocking novel for fans of Richard Kadrey's The Dead Take the A Train.--Matthew Galloway