Maeve Fly

April 3, 2023
Leede’s bloody debut sends its nihilistic heroine down a twisted path in the footsteps of her literary idol, Patrick Bateman. Maeve Fly leads a split-life between her day job as a princess at a cheekily unnamed mouse-centric amusement park in Anaheim and the dive bars of the Sunset Strip, alternately fixated on her coworker Kate; her Hollywood starlet grandmother, Tallulah; and her own place in the midst of celebrity. When she meets Kate’s enigmatic hockey star brother, Gideon, the pair enter an increasingly twisted relationship and Maeve turns to murder, mutilation, and nocturnal perversions with no motive other than entertainment. (“Men,” Maeve muses, “have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason.”) Leede does an excellent job of anchoring the story’s more chaotic excesses in Maeve’s narration, which offers equal parts trenchant insight and pitch-black humor. Though the plot occasionally loses focus, it quickly finds its footing again as Maeve’s deteriorating mental state drives things toward a satisfyingly visceral conclusion. The result is a gore-soaked love letter to Los Angeles that fans of American Psycho and Samantha Kolesnik’s True Crime won’t want to miss.

June 10, 2024

Leede's gruesome debut novel follows Maeve Fly, who, when not portraying an ice princess at "the happiest place on Earth," wanders the Sunset Strip's seedy bars, emulating her misanthropic literary heroes and drinking. Maeve's worldview is upended when her best friend's brother Gideon moves to town, and some truly disturbing sculptures appear throughout the city. Soon, Maeve's life unravels, and she must evolve, adopting a persona that's less casually misanthropic and more unashamedly brutal. Maeve has a lot of violence in her, and on Halloween night, she releases that violence on an unsuspecting Los Angeles. The LA setting, along with the theme park that cannot be named, make this book seem like a satire of the town's artifice. Still, Leede's words and narrator Sosie Bacon's voice imbue Maeve with thought-provoking realism and earnestness, even as her violent acts become more savagely creative. Ramping up the violence until the very end, the novel climaxes in a tragic event that will leave listeners empathizing with Maeve, even after the bloody trail she's left. VERDICT Leede's chilling case study on how to create a monster should appeal to fans of Bella Mackie's How To Kill Your Family and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.--James Gardner

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