PRODUCER NIK VS MAEVE FLY

CJ Leede takes Nikolas on a tour of Hollywood, sharing the bloody drama and broken dreams instead of the stars and spectacle.

By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess.

By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes.

But when Gideon Green-her best friend’s brother-moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet.

Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new personal. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.

Title: Maeve Fly

Author: CJ Leede

Genre: Horror

Pages: 304

Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook / Audiobook

Equal parts humorous and horrific, Maeve Fly takes us behind-the-scenes to catch a glimpse of the ugliness and pettiness of career princesses, the corruption of old Hollywood, and the film industry’s predatory behavior. There’s no question in my mind that this book earned every bit of hype surrounding it, as well as the awards it obtained for the author.

Maeve is a captivating character, who comes to life on the page in all her flawed, bloodthirsty, and increasingly erratic glory. She is a beautiful disaster, who found acceptance and safety in a grandmother she’s only just come to know, not long before that relationship is stolen from her by the older woman’s illness—but not before she learns that certain kinds of madness might skip a generation.

Maeve’s judgment is questionable—at best—and it’s only getting worse as the story progresses. She becomes paranoid and prone to rash acts of violence as she feels her life slipping out of control in ways she hadn’t anticipated. The more the real world slides out of sync with the version of reality she’s built up in her mind, the more Maeve slips away from social constraints and conventions…and you wouldn’t want to be the poor messenger to inform her that her presumptions are incorrect.

We’re forced to passively witness as Maeve loses control of her darker impulses, destroying even the people and things she cares about. But she manages to remain in surprisingly good spirits throughout some of the most grandiose of her turns, and it’s hard not to root for her just a little bit, even when it’s hard to justify what she’s doing.

This is an amazing book for fans of Kristopher Triana’s Full Brutal (but with a far more sympathetic protagonist), Rob Nelson’s Made a Monster, and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. There’s also a dose of Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane thrown into the mix, and something magnificent came about as a result.

Nikolas P. Robinson is an avid consumer of books, movies, and television, especially where horror, science fiction, and fantasy are concerned. When he isn’t consuming media, he’s creating it as an author, photographer, videographer, and news producer in Portland, Oregon.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing, nor do the views or opinions of Crystal Lake necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or its staff. Thank you for understanding.