Last time we heard Sosie Bacon, she was giving her lungs a good screaming workout in Parker Finn’s horror blockbuster Smile. Soon, her vocals will get a different – but similarly spooky – chance to shine. FANGORIA can exclusively announce that the star will lend her voice talent to the audiobook adaptation of Maeve Fly, the upcoming debut novel from horror writer CJ Leede.
Publishers Macmillan Audio have described Maeve Fly as a ‘blood-soaked love letter to Los Angeles and a gleeful send-up to iconic horror villains’, while prolific horror author Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group) has sung his praises for the debut, calling it “an apocalyptic Anaheim Psycho, a guidebook to the dead spaces of Los Angeles, a Hollywood black mass, an occult ritual that cracks the earth, Maeve oozes enough anguish, alienation, and angst to drown the world.” Damn – that blurb alone should get Maeve Fly to the top of your TBR list.
Here’s the official plot synopsis from Macmillan:
By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess. By night, she haunts the dive bars of the Sunset Strip, 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.
In a statement to hardcover publisher Nightfire, Leede spoke about the ideas and inspirations that came to her after reading George Bataille’s scandalous 1928 novella Story of the Eye:
I was simultaneously driving across America – from LA and back – during a pandemic to visit my sick mother in New York. The whole of the vitriolic pre-election nation I passed through was rearing angry and insistent in my thoughts. Additionally, before the pandemic, I lost my first loved one, and three more swiftly followed. My first intimate brush with death, and then the world exploded with it. Like so many, my mind was plagued with fear for our future. Everything felt more dire and fragile than ever before. And a new emotion I hadn’t experienced much in my life, if ever, emerged inside me too. I kept coming back to Story of the Eye, and I eventually came to understand that what I was feeling had a name. It was Rage. Irrational and feral rage. Juvenile, even. The same rage that anyone who has grieved knows intimately, the very same that most of us have felt at one point or other in the pandemic year.
In writing Maeve, my rage was transmuted into something pleasurable, celebratory, even, of the darkness in the world and inside us. Reminders, both, that we are here experiencing life. My hope is that the reader will find the same catharsis in Maeve that I found in the work of others before me. It is meant to be joyful in its camp and gratuitousness. The world will likely fill us with fear, so why not allow ourselves the means to indulge and escape into literature? Why not cloak ourselves in hedonism and blood-soaked princess gowns?
Needless to say, we absolutely can’t wait to hear Sosie narrate the gloriously gory scenes of Maeve Fly! As a bonus while you wait for the novel, CJ has put together a playlist titled ‘The Music of Maeve Fly‘ so you can warm up your ears before treating them to Sosie’s dulcet tones.
The audiobook and hardcover edition are set to be released on June 6 (perfect timing for a summer holiday listen/read). You can preorder your digital copy here!
