Sacrificial Animals: A Novel

by Kailee Pedersen Narrated by Yung-I Chang

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The American Midwest turns sinister in this novel of ancient secrets, modern lies and messy family ties. Unnerving and disturbing, Sacrificial Animals will creep up your spine and have you looking over your shoulder.

Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.

But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia's interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

Punctuated by scenes from Nick's adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

*Named a "Best Horror Book of 2024" by The New York Times, Vulture, Esquire, Paste Magazine, and Barnes & Noble*
*CrimeReads, Best Gothic Fiction of 2024*
*New York Public Library, Best Books for Adults 2024*
*Finalist for the Libby Book Awards, Best Horror*
*Otherwise Award 2024 Long List*
*Nebraska Book Award, Fiction Honor recipient*

"An unremittingly gloomy and oppressive story that will haunt you for days... Pedersen is a great writer with a strong voice and an obvious love of language... [Sacrificial Animals] establishes Pedersen as a future master of speculative fiction." —The New York Times

"This novel presents a contemplatively paced supernatural horror tale, centering family, trauma, and revenge, with unease infused into every detail...the tightly coiled tension will eventually explode; when it does, [readers] will be left gasping in awe. Pedersen’s debut skillfully balances character and atmosphere." —Library Journal, starred review

"This incantatory debut builds menace from its opening phrase. The author is merciless. She writes with a rare acuity...few readers are likely to quit before the final chapter...An assured and bloody fable heralds the arrival of a gifted new voice." —Kirkus Reviews

"The mythic Chinese figure of the nine-tailed fox spirit goes Midwestern Gothic in Pedersen’s unsettling debut. Literary horror that isn’t afraid to show its teeth. Pedersen is sure to win fans." —Publishers Weekly

"A slow burning horror story...Pedersen provides a brilliant and unforgiving commentary on toxic masculinity and racism." —Booklist

“A genre mashup of Chinese mythology, supernatural horror, thriller, and Midwestern family drama, Sacrificial Animals is a breathtaking upending of the American family saga.” —Shelf Awareness

" Savage in its details and saturated with dread." —Esquire, The Best Horror Books of 2024

"A remarkable debut, a striking blend of American frontier stoicism and Chinese folklore." —Vulture, Best Horror Books of 2024

"Dark and bone-chillingly bloody... Sacrificial Animals is remarkable in its keen barbarism, the author’s blending of the ordinary violence of rural life with the gravity of a Chinese myth... The novel’s final pages are a wild frenzy of beauty, vengeance and viscera." —LA Times

"Tense, lush, and laced with beautifully engineered dread, [Sacrificial Animals] is a special book, one that horror fans everywhere should pick up as soon as possible, because you don’t want to miss a moment of what this author has got to show you." —Paste Magazine

“Kailee Pedersen explodes onto the scene with Sacrificial Animals! A weird, gorgeously written supernatural thriller about how the crimes of our fathers can cast dark and devastating shadows over innocent lives. Very highly recommended!” -Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of Cave 13 and The Dragon in Winter

"Sacrificial Animals is distinctly observant, and distinctly unsettling. It begins with one sort of menace and ends with another entirely, so that while the book barely leaves its little patch of acres, and the souls who occupy it hardly move an inch from the traumas that shaped them long ago, it leaves you with a feeling of immense distances traveled." -Kevin Brockmeier, New York Times Bestselling author

"An incandescent study of American masculinity with an unforgettable genre-busting twist." - Alex Landragin, author of Crossings

"Brutal and mesmerizing, Kailee Pedersen's Sacrificial Animals drew me in immediately. Easily readable in one sitting, this enigmatic family saga is better savored to appreciate the rhythm of the language and the growing sense of unease. Highly recommended." - Kendare Blake, #1 NYT bestselling author of Three Dark Crowns

"A delicately braided and unflinching tale of inherited family damage and revenge that walks a careful line between the realistic and the supernatural, crossing from one into the other before you--or the hapless characters--are fully aware. Sacrificial Animals reads like what might happen if Cormac McCarthy and Lafcadio Hearn were stuck waiting out a snowstorm in Nebraska and decided to collaborate." - Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

"Kailee Pedersen employs the rich prose of early Cormac McCarthy, the bracingly vivid descriptive power of Willa Cather, and the doom-heavy fatefulness of Greek tragedy to create something very much her own: a deliciously gothic horror novel. The set-up is simple: an abusive father summons his two grown sons home for a deathbed reconciliation. But before they can bury the old man, the ghost of a crime from their collective past comes calling, seeking vengeance. Sacrificial Animals' final thirty pages will leave you gasping.” - Scott Smith, New York Times Bestselling author of The Ruins

"Kailee Pedersen's terse, tense, deeply unnerving debut novel mesmerized me from beginning to end. This is a young writer to watch!" -Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk

Kirkus Reviews

2024-05-31
A Nebraska family’s unquenchable violence is interrupted, then accelerated, by a femme fatale.

This incantatory debut builds menace from its opening phrase: “Moonlight slashes open the boy’s face.” The boy, Nick Morrow, is indeed menaced—and beaten—by father and brother; mom is killed off in childbirth in the second paragraph. Nick is trapped on his family’s “one thousand acres of rich loam atop the Ogallala Aquifer,” a place called Stag’s Crossing, thanks to the stag’s head perched on the front gate. It’s just the first decapitation featured in this grisly and relentlessly readable horror story. The author toggles 40 staccato chapters, each titled “Then” or “Now,” shifting between Nick’s adolescence and an excruciating time three decades later. The patriarch, Carlyle Morrow, possessing “a violence keen and beautiful as the silver curve of a fishhook,” has engineered a ruse to bring home his two estranged middle-aged sons. The favored older, Joshua, brings Emilia, his “high-strung, unintimidated” Asian American wife; Joshua’s choice of her ruptured Carlyle’s hold on his offspring. Now, thanks to the shocking and unnatural nature of Emilia, the Morrow patrimony of cruelty, wielded “with an ancient and primeval ecstasy,” will climax. And when it does, the author—who was adopted from Nanning, China, onto a Nebraska farm—is merciless. She writes with a rare acuity, bending her language toward fable, salting it with words like “demesne,” “eidolon,” and “sinfonietta.” She is excellent at blurring the animal and human, even as her unbroken tone lacks the quotidian details that can relieve and ratchet horror. Still, few readers are likely to quit before the final chapter, “Then & Now.”

An assured and bloody fable heralds the arrival of a gifted new voice attuned to ancient modes of damnation.

PAPERBACK COMMENTARY

2024 NYPL Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, Long-listed

2024 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 NYPL Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159557506
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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