Book 8 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! Continuing my current habit of flipping between a horror book and a sci-fi book.

One of the best things about social media, amongst many, many downsides, is getting exposed to a bunch of authors you might never have ever come across. In this case, I’ve been following Hailey Piper on social media for a while, and finally got motivated to pick up one of her books, in this case A Light Most Hateful (2023).

I didn’t really know what to expect going in, which is good, because the book was surprising in a variety of ways, all good!

Olivia ran away from home at a teenager three years ago, and has found herself stuck ever since in a dull job in the insignificant town of Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the only thing that keeps her in town and going on in life is her best friend Sunflower, who she cares for even more than just a friend.

It seems like nothing will ever change, until one night she is working at the drive-in theater and a storm rolls over town: a storm that brings madness to most of the residents of Chapel Hill, and even worse, brings monsters and unfathomable dangers along with it. With the help of a strange drifter who calls themself Christmas, Olivia seeks to find Sunflower and escape the town and the storm before it destroys them all. However, it appears that the forces behind the supernatural events may have set their sights on the friends, and will break reality itself to get to them…

A Light Most Hateful starts at an incredibly fast pace! We get just enough of an introduction to Olivia, Sunflower, and Christmas before a monster devours a person whole and starts a chain of increasingly violent and impossible events. In spite of that quick introduction, I felt like I had learned enough about the characters to be deeply invested in what happened to them, a testament to the writing skills of the author.

This is a book whose trajectory is almost impossible to predict. It starts off feeling like a somewhat familiar zombie-esque type story, with Olivia, Sunflower and Christmas taking pains to avoid infected townsfolk and the monster that is stalking them, and then it takes one increasingly unhinged twist after another, until the nature of the story is very different and literal houses are dropping down on our protagonists. Being a long-time reader of horror, I developed somewhat of an inkling of where some aspects of the story might be headed early on, though that was in large part due to some fair hints that were dropped by the author. The book earns its revelations, and none of them feel cheap or unjustified, and a partial guess on my part of where things were heading didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the story at all.

As for the larger themes of the book: A Light Most Hateful serves as a reflection on trauma, longing and loss and the long-term impacts that those experiences can have on people. As I’ve said many times before, I believe that all good books are about something, and this book definitely has something to say.

I still find myself smiling when I think of how the twists of the book played out; I really enjoyed A Light Most Hateful, and will certainly be tracking down more of Piper’s works in the future!