Sweetheart

For ten years, Beth Ashby has been sick. Not hospital sick. Not the kind anyone can name. Just tired enough, feverish enough, to never quite leave home.

Everyone in Fond Bay calls it a family thing. The Ashby women. Sweethearts. Homebodies. Beth's mother was one too, before she died with a packed bag still sitting by the back door.

What's actually inside Beth is twenty-seven centimeters long, coiled behind her liver, and has spent a decade learning exactly what it takes to make staying feel like her own idea.

It isn't lying to her. That's the horror of it - it loves her, in the only way it knows how: by keeping her.

Told in two voices that were never meant to share a body - Beth's, furious and going anyway, and the thing inside her, intimate, self-justifying, and slowly losing its grip on its own story - Sweetheart is a novel about staying versus being kept, and how hard it can be to tell the difference from the inside.

When a new vet in town starts giving Beth reasons to leave the house, the thing inside her has a choice: let her go and risk dying with her under the light of an operating table, or make her sick enough, tired enough, that leaving never quite happens.

It has ten years of practice at this.

She has one night to notice.

• A dual-narrator horror novel for readers of literary body horror and slow-burn sapphic romance


• A parasite who believes, sincerely, that it is the hero of this story


• An ending you will still be turning over after you close the book


• For readers who want their horror literary, their romance slow, and their parasites unreasonably charming