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Disco Murder City
The body count is rising. The lights are getting low.
Murder City moves to the pulse of disco and dread. The music is loud, the drugs are cheap, and the dance floor is packed with beautiful bodies pretending they don’t hear the screams. Sleep paralysis demons creep in from the shadows, some faceless and crafting masks from twisted twigs, feathers, broken glass, and chicken bones. Others have feathers for eyes that can be harvested, then smoked. Another takes form in a bodiless voice, whispering bloodlust into sleeping ears. But, the city embraces the chaos, flocking to the Disco.
Netti drifts through it all, an inbetweener at a corrupt cartoon studio who’s fostering a habit of stealing masks from demons. Wrapped in his fur coat, he stalks the city’s shadows, drawn to the masks and the madness by something he doesn’t understand. He’s got nothing but a sadistic cop, the logic of his nightmares, and a city that offers no answers.
Slick with blood, hot with neon, and grooving to the sound of blade on bone, the Disco never stops.
Murder City moves to the pulse of disco and dread. The music is loud, the drugs are cheap, and the dance floor is packed with beautiful bodies pretending they don’t hear the screams. Sleep paralysis demons creep in from the shadows, some faceless and crafting masks from twisted twigs, feathers, broken glass, and chicken bones. Others have feathers for eyes that can be harvested, then smoked. Another takes form in a bodiless voice, whispering bloodlust into sleeping ears. But, the city embraces the chaos, flocking to the Disco.
Netti drifts through it all, an inbetweener at a corrupt cartoon studio who’s fostering a habit of stealing masks from demons. Wrapped in his fur coat, he stalks the city’s shadows, drawn to the masks and the madness by something he doesn’t understand. He’s got nothing but a sadistic cop, the logic of his nightmares, and a city that offers no answers.
Slick with blood, hot with neon, and grooving to the sound of blade on bone, the Disco never stops.
- GenresHorror
204 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2025
3 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 16, 2025
Quirky horror
Netti is fascinated by the masked demons that creep from the shadows at discos that are filled with people who are pretending they don’t notice them and what is happening. With little but his logic from the nightmares he has, Netti is seeking answers he cannot find.
This was so imaginative, and while the idea of these different demons from the shadows were creepy, they were also vibrant and unique in a way that meant I sort of understood why Netti was so caught up in what they were. There was this sense that this was real but that it also perhaps wasn’t and so Netti was desperate for answers that he needed physical items to help him understand. The need to get the masks from the different types of demons was intriguing and even had me curious to know what and how.
In a way this story felt like something was still hidden, still lurking from Netti and us as readers. There were such descriptions that really put you into the scene, sometimes in a sensual way and others in a frozen but in the moment to learn so much about the demons way.
I really enjoyed this and was surprised by how even though horror based stories aren’t really my thing, this one mixed with disco vibrancy and shadows really worked to intrigue rather than scare.
Netti is fascinated by the masked demons that creep from the shadows at discos that are filled with people who are pretending they don’t notice them and what is happening. With little but his logic from the nightmares he has, Netti is seeking answers he cannot find.
This was so imaginative, and while the idea of these different demons from the shadows were creepy, they were also vibrant and unique in a way that meant I sort of understood why Netti was so caught up in what they were. There was this sense that this was real but that it also perhaps wasn’t and so Netti was desperate for answers that he needed physical items to help him understand. The need to get the masks from the different types of demons was intriguing and even had me curious to know what and how.
In a way this story felt like something was still hidden, still lurking from Netti and us as readers. There were such descriptions that really put you into the scene, sometimes in a sensual way and others in a frozen but in the moment to learn so much about the demons way.
I really enjoyed this and was surprised by how even though horror based stories aren’t really my thing, this one mixed with disco vibrancy and shadows really worked to intrigue rather than scare.
September 12, 2025
Disco Murder City by Caleb Bethea
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)
🪩 Spoiler-free blurb:
What if the dance floor wasn’t just for glitter and sweat… but also demons, knives, and the occasional spine-crack? Disco Murder City throws you headfirst into a fever dream where the music never stops, the violence is as sharp as the strobe lights, and survival is a dance move in itself. Think surreal horror noir meets Studio 54—if Studio 54 was run by sleep-paralysis demons.
💀 Review:
This book is WILD. From the very first scene, Bethea makes it clear you’re not getting a “cozy little murder mystery.” Nope—you’re getting grotesque sandwiches, cracked vertebrae, demon masks, and a disco floor slick with more than spilled cocktails. And I loved it.
✨ The good:
• The atmosphere is a neon fever dream—purple lights, feathers, blood, sweat—it drips.
• Netti, our inbetweener protagonist, is such a chaotic delight. He’s flawed, funny, tragic, and still weirdly likable in the middle of absolute carnage.
• The originality is next-level. Horror, noir, disco, surrealism—this is a mash-up that actually works.
👻 The not-so-good:
• Sometimes the imagery goes so hard it nearly drowns the story—like trying to read while stuck in a smoke machine.
• Plot isn’t always the priority—it’s more about vibe than strict narrative.
• Some demon encounters felt a little repetitive, though still gruesomely fun.
🩸 Final thoughts:
This isn’t a book you “sit down and sip tea with.” This is a book you shotgun under the disco ball at 3am while demons breathe down your neck. Messy, stylish, and dripping with originality—it’s a hell of a ride for horror fans who like their stories loud and strange.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)
🪩 Spoiler-free blurb:
What if the dance floor wasn’t just for glitter and sweat… but also demons, knives, and the occasional spine-crack? Disco Murder City throws you headfirst into a fever dream where the music never stops, the violence is as sharp as the strobe lights, and survival is a dance move in itself. Think surreal horror noir meets Studio 54—if Studio 54 was run by sleep-paralysis demons.
💀 Review:
This book is WILD. From the very first scene, Bethea makes it clear you’re not getting a “cozy little murder mystery.” Nope—you’re getting grotesque sandwiches, cracked vertebrae, demon masks, and a disco floor slick with more than spilled cocktails. And I loved it.
✨ The good:
• The atmosphere is a neon fever dream—purple lights, feathers, blood, sweat—it drips.
• Netti, our inbetweener protagonist, is such a chaotic delight. He’s flawed, funny, tragic, and still weirdly likable in the middle of absolute carnage.
• The originality is next-level. Horror, noir, disco, surrealism—this is a mash-up that actually works.
👻 The not-so-good:
• Sometimes the imagery goes so hard it nearly drowns the story—like trying to read while stuck in a smoke machine.
• Plot isn’t always the priority—it’s more about vibe than strict narrative.
• Some demon encounters felt a little repetitive, though still gruesomely fun.
🩸 Final thoughts:
This isn’t a book you “sit down and sip tea with.” This is a book you shotgun under the disco ball at 3am while demons breathe down your neck. Messy, stylish, and dripping with originality—it’s a hell of a ride for horror fans who like their stories loud and strange.
November 19, 2025
BWAF Score: 7/10
Caleb Bethea’s latest is a sticky-floored neon séance where the city’s nightlife grows teeth and starts chewing. It plays like a cult midnight movie in prose, equal parts bouncer story, urban myth, and police procedural with a funhouse mirror. The book lands because it knows exactly what it is and never lets the bassline die.
Bethea has been circling loud, punk-lit horror for a while, and this one feels like the cleanest distillation of that voice. You can see the Maudlin House DNA in the swagger and snap, but the confidence here is its own thing, a club set from a DJ who knows when to cut the lights.
Netti is our main lens, a nightlife lifer dodging the masked Killer turning dance floors into altars, while Detective Castra stalks the case through alleys, greenrooms, and back rooms that smell like sweat and fryer oil. What breaks the usual is the invasion of not-quite-human presences that glide through the crowd like beautiful contagion. Stakes are simple. Survive the night, unmask what’s feeding, and keep your soul from getting traded for a song.
Appetite runs through everything. The city eats. The clubs eat. People feed on attention, bodies, jokes, and meat. The set pieces snap: a stand-up set that doubles as confession booth, a kill among mirrored tiles that feels like ritual choreography, a deli scene where sandwiches look like offerings to a god with ketchup on its mouth. The images repeat like hooks until they burrow in.
The book is fast and grimy in the right ways. Short, tactile sentences. Dialogue that hits like bar talk at last call. Bethea cuts between POVs with a crowd-cam vibe, using feathers, meat, and mirror glitter as an image system that binds scenes into one fever. Pacing runs hot, but there’s control under the sweat.
Under the spectacle, the theme is complicity. Violence becomes an act and the crowd keeps dancing. The aftertaste is a lousy little question about how much you’d ignore to keep the night going.
In a year stacked with indie urban nightmares, this one stands tall on the slasher shelf and throws sparks across occult-noir. Loud, lurid, and distinctive enough that you’ll swear you hear the track still thumping after the lights come up.
Read if club-set supernatural slashers, gallows humor, and urban grime are your jam.
Skip if you need strict monster rules, tidy structure, and spotless heroes.
Caleb Bethea’s latest is a sticky-floored neon séance where the city’s nightlife grows teeth and starts chewing. It plays like a cult midnight movie in prose, equal parts bouncer story, urban myth, and police procedural with a funhouse mirror. The book lands because it knows exactly what it is and never lets the bassline die.
Bethea has been circling loud, punk-lit horror for a while, and this one feels like the cleanest distillation of that voice. You can see the Maudlin House DNA in the swagger and snap, but the confidence here is its own thing, a club set from a DJ who knows when to cut the lights.
Netti is our main lens, a nightlife lifer dodging the masked Killer turning dance floors into altars, while Detective Castra stalks the case through alleys, greenrooms, and back rooms that smell like sweat and fryer oil. What breaks the usual is the invasion of not-quite-human presences that glide through the crowd like beautiful contagion. Stakes are simple. Survive the night, unmask what’s feeding, and keep your soul from getting traded for a song.
Appetite runs through everything. The city eats. The clubs eat. People feed on attention, bodies, jokes, and meat. The set pieces snap: a stand-up set that doubles as confession booth, a kill among mirrored tiles that feels like ritual choreography, a deli scene where sandwiches look like offerings to a god with ketchup on its mouth. The images repeat like hooks until they burrow in.
The book is fast and grimy in the right ways. Short, tactile sentences. Dialogue that hits like bar talk at last call. Bethea cuts between POVs with a crowd-cam vibe, using feathers, meat, and mirror glitter as an image system that binds scenes into one fever. Pacing runs hot, but there’s control under the sweat.
Under the spectacle, the theme is complicity. Violence becomes an act and the crowd keeps dancing. The aftertaste is a lousy little question about how much you’d ignore to keep the night going.
In a year stacked with indie urban nightmares, this one stands tall on the slasher shelf and throws sparks across occult-noir. Loud, lurid, and distinctive enough that you’ll swear you hear the track still thumping after the lights come up.
Read if club-set supernatural slashers, gallows humor, and urban grime are your jam.
Skip if you need strict monster rules, tidy structure, and spotless heroes.
December 24, 2025
To be honest, this is not an easy book for me to review: it's well outside my comfort zone, both in relation to the thoughtfully messy, non-linear writing style, and the unconventional, choppy pacing; but above all it's the stream of consciousness feel that gave me the most trouble: the book goes for a lived-in vibe, so to speak, a homely, even carnivalesque chaos, delivering an outlook of commitment to glittery urban fantasy so intense, a sort of urgency to devour every moment to the full - and yet out of this urgency a tale emerges, a slasher disco noir, with a supernatural twist which will either work for you or not - nothing in between! (I'm still not convinced it worked for me.) So this book is definitely not for everyone.
"Disco Murder City" sure breaks the mold by defying standard expectations from a slasher, choosing instead to keep the suspense high as long as it takes in order to offer an enhanced narrative experience - a metaphorical disco ball of words, images, and themes that will either confuse or entertain (perhaps both). Once the dust settles, the story follows a surreal and occassionally grotesque nightmare logic, full of bizarre plot devices (from unreliable narrators to ambiguous world-building clues), raising the stakes every chance it gets. I personally felt I was always missing something, even when I was sure I knew what was happening lol
The premise is complex enough to provide a feel for the book: when disco comes back in fashion, sleep paralysis demons escape from people's consciousness and go haunt the dance floors with weird masks, feathers, and whispers. Enter the Killer - a masked demon prepared to turn the discos into places of gore and carnage. Police gets involved, but it is Nettie, our fur-clad, campy and artistic protagonist who stumbles upon them, and is hooked!
If the idea of Brazil being filmed as a queer slasher in a fully packed Studio 54 excites you, then this is 100% the book for you! I look forward to whatever the author has planned next!
"Disco Murder City" sure breaks the mold by defying standard expectations from a slasher, choosing instead to keep the suspense high as long as it takes in order to offer an enhanced narrative experience - a metaphorical disco ball of words, images, and themes that will either confuse or entertain (perhaps both). Once the dust settles, the story follows a surreal and occassionally grotesque nightmare logic, full of bizarre plot devices (from unreliable narrators to ambiguous world-building clues), raising the stakes every chance it gets. I personally felt I was always missing something, even when I was sure I knew what was happening lol
The premise is complex enough to provide a feel for the book: when disco comes back in fashion, sleep paralysis demons escape from people's consciousness and go haunt the dance floors with weird masks, feathers, and whispers. Enter the Killer - a masked demon prepared to turn the discos into places of gore and carnage. Police gets involved, but it is Nettie, our fur-clad, campy and artistic protagonist who stumbles upon them, and is hooked!
If the idea of Brazil being filmed as a queer slasher in a fully packed Studio 54 excites you, then this is 100% the book for you! I look forward to whatever the author has planned next!
July 27, 2025
The author provided me with a digital ARC of this book, in exchange for my open and honest opinions.
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in 1979, Disco died. Some things which die can be resurrected, but at what cost? What comes back with it? Amidst a landscape of Decay, Filth, Cocaine, Demons, Human Suffering and Death, Caleb Bethea has released this story.
A seemingly unending Nightmare, twisting around, looping, spiraling on itself. A tale fueled by Drugs, adrenaline, and the hollow void of the heart yearning for something lost, or perhaps was never had to be begin with. A Neon soaked wave of mass panic and euphoria. Bill Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti by way of David Lynch, Dario Argento and that lost hoard of grindhouse film directors. Moments of laughter, of near absurdity will catch you off guard, and keep you moving through streets of Disco Murder City, choked with bodies, shuffling through piles of teeth and mounds of feathers.
-
in 1979, Disco died. Some things which die can be resurrected, but at what cost? What comes back with it? Amidst a landscape of Decay, Filth, Cocaine, Demons, Human Suffering and Death, Caleb Bethea has released this story.
A seemingly unending Nightmare, twisting around, looping, spiraling on itself. A tale fueled by Drugs, adrenaline, and the hollow void of the heart yearning for something lost, or perhaps was never had to be begin with. A Neon soaked wave of mass panic and euphoria. Bill Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti by way of David Lynch, Dario Argento and that lost hoard of grindhouse film directors. Moments of laughter, of near absurdity will catch you off guard, and keep you moving through streets of Disco Murder City, choked with bodies, shuffling through piles of teeth and mounds of feathers.
October 7, 2025
I’m not a horror girly, but I am a fan of experimental fiction and good, visceral writing. The sentence-level prose here is such a gut punch. The author has tapped into this voice that’s irreverent, freaky, clever, surprising, and incredibly addictive. Murder City itself is wonderfully rendered—a Joker’s Gotham full of sleep paralysis demons and detectives and ad agencies scrambling to make money off of it all. I recommend this book to horror fans and readers bored of predicable story structures. Disco Murder City is groovy, gory, and best read with the lights on.
December 14, 2025
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Thought this was a fun and unique concept for a slasher. I also feel like I'm personally targeted as the exact audience for this book as someone who gets sleep paralysis regularly. The entire thing felt like a fever dream and I just had to keep reading. Super fast-paced and short, this one can easily be finished in a day. I love books where the setting almost plays a character and the nightclub dance floor is exactly that.
Thought this was a fun and unique concept for a slasher. I also feel like I'm personally targeted as the exact audience for this book as someone who gets sleep paralysis regularly. The entire thing felt like a fever dream and I just had to keep reading. Super fast-paced and short, this one can easily be finished in a day. I love books where the setting almost plays a character and the nightclub dance floor is exactly that.
December 20, 2025
PR read. Thank you Caleb for the copy of your book.
There’s something watching the disco goer’s and Nettie’s tracking them. Demons that is. Netti tracks them during sleep paralysis. Desperately seeking the disco m*rderer.
I liked the irony of silent k*llers amongst the busy, bustling disco. The writing style is different from styles I’ve read. Disjointed chapters, sequences in their own right add to the overall atmosphere and feel of this book. Pick this one up if demons, paranormal and speculative fiction is your bag.
There’s something watching the disco goer’s and Nettie’s tracking them. Demons that is. Netti tracks them during sleep paralysis. Desperately seeking the disco m*rderer.
I liked the irony of silent k*llers amongst the busy, bustling disco. The writing style is different from styles I’ve read. Disjointed chapters, sequences in their own right add to the overall atmosphere and feel of this book. Pick this one up if demons, paranormal and speculative fiction is your bag.
September 7, 2025
Lynchian, weird, off the wall, and such a fever dream in the fullest expression of the phrase. I am absolutely going to buy whatever this author publishes in the future. This feels like so many of the weird horror movies from the 80s I love so much.
Super psyched to have received a review copy from the author. Thanks!
Super psyched to have received a review copy from the author. Thanks!
October 3, 2025
Studio 54 meets slasher gore. A stylish allegory that is both wonderfully campy and outrageously gruesome.
July 17, 2025
This was so unique and unlike any horror book I’ve read! Slasher meets disco meets sleep paralysis demons?! Sign me up. I enjoyed the fast pace and the descriptions that really brought the scenes to life. I felt like I was in the disco, experiencing all the blood and horror for myself. I invite you to do the same!
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December 21, 2025full of grotesque imagery, colors and mysterious liquids ooze through the entire book!! i thought this was a really interesting read - it definitely paints a really descriptive scene of murder city as you follow Netti along in their aimless wandering in the dank, blood-soaked floors of the club - i struggled through some of the narrative but the writing itself is amazing and Caleb Bethea is definitely an author for you to look out for!!!!!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews