Kill Your Darling

by Clay McLeod Chapman

The acclaimed author of Ghost Eaters and What Kind of Mother is coming to Bad Hand Books with a new novella (nearly 40,000 words).

About Clay McLeod Chapman’s Kill Your Darling:

The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later.

Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade—or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.

Rule number Write what you know—so Glenn decides to share his son’s story. The class offers him a chance to make sense of a senseless crime and find the fictional closure life never provided. But as Glenn’s story takes on a life of its own, someone from the past is compelled to come out of hiding before he reaches…

The End.

Genres: Horror, Novella, Mystery, Fiction, Grief, Crime, Adult

192 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2024

About the author

Books. Children's books. Comic books. Film.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We’re supposed to mourn our deceased loved ones—but what happens when grief is all you have, when grief becomes addictive, turns toxic, downright poisonous?”

From the very first page, Kill Your Darling grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. Clay McLeod Chapman delivers a masterclass in psychological suspense, weaving a tale that is both intimate and unsettling. Glenn Partridge’s grief is so raw you can taste it, every memory of his son’s murder resonates with heartbreaking clarity, and his decision to write “what you know” propels the narrative into uncharted emotional territory.

Chapman’s prose is simple, boiling down the complexities of loss into moments of crystalline honesty. The workshop scenes crackle with authenticity, there’s real compassion and frustration in every prompt, every critique, as Glenn wrestles with the power of storytelling to heal (or to damn). Just when you think you’ve settled into a rhythm, Chapman pulls the rug out from under you, revealing a ghost from Glenn’s past whose arrival feels both inevitable and seismic.

What makes this novella phenomenal is its tight focus, at just over 200 pages, there’s no fat, only the lean, pulsing heartbeat of a father’s obsession. The final twist lands with such emotional force that you feel it in your chest long after you close the book. Kill Your Darling isn’t just a story about solving a crime; it’s a meditation on the lengths we go to find closure and the stories we tell ourselves along the way.

My Highest Recommendation.

[Char · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audio Edition Review:

When I was offered the chance to listen to this brilliant book on audio, I jumped at it!

I don't envy the task set before Sean Patrick Hopkins in voicing this grief-based piece of horror fiction.
A first person narrative from the point-of-view of the father of a murdered son has to be a daunting task. I'm here to tell you, he pulled it off and he made it look, (sound?), easy!

As you can imagine, this isn't a happy story but it's a compelling one. As this elderly man faces his own impending demise, he attempts to finally come to terms with his son's unsolved murder. Does he ultimately do that? You'll have to listen to it to find out and I strongly urge you to do just that!

My highest recommendation!
ARC from narrator

My original review:
This little novella grabbed me by my heartstrings and then whipped me face first into the ground over and over again. I’m beaten, bruised and exhausted. I freaking loved it.

Grief based horror is a thing, especially when it's done as well as this. Not all horror is involved with haunted houses or supernatural experiences, or even slashers. Sometimes it's plain daily life and the awful things that often happen while one is about the dirty business of living.

*Thanks to Dana who gave away copies on Twitter. I immediately went and bought another copy to help support this author and publisher.*

[Gareth Is Haunted · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping, painful, heart rending and captivating novella.

"The sentences we serve, the punishments we perform, are our own form of hell."

Clay has done it again. How he manages to invoke so many thoughts and feelings in so few words is beyond me. An absolute masterclass in writing.

Ultimately this is one man's story of deep grief and our ability to relive and even rewrite history. It's one of those stories which you can interpret in many ways, you can take it as it is or interpret a completely different narrative. I love that.
What is truth after all?

"There’s no justice. There has never been justice. The guilty go free. The innocent suffer. The wicked live. This story goes on unfinished, untold."

Never has a book grabbed me so hard and pulled me into itself as hard as this has.
Read this on sight but be prepared for an emotional ride!

[Marguerite Turley · Rating 5 out of 5]

We follow Glenn and Carol Partridge who lost their son Billy 40 years ago in a horrific way. This is a beautiful and hushed study on how the couples grief has affected them individually and as a couple over the years. They are perpetually haunted by their loss, but Carol signs Glenn up for a creative writing workshop and there Glenn learns how to write Billy’s story. Clay is incredible at getting into a character’s head where we can move about freely and find all of the hidden thoughts that really make us feel closer to them. This was an incredible story, but it is like a punch to the gut. I loved these characters so much, I just wanted them to get the closure they deserved. Bravo Clay, your writing will never cease to amaze me!!

[Sjgomzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read all year!

[Stay Fetters · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Why wait when we can suffer for our own sins right here and now?"

Grief horror is a genre that isn't often explored in writing. It's challenging to engage with because your emotions are sure to be affected. Clay takes a bold approach to this genre, and I truly believe he can create something extraordinary regardless of the subject.

He skillfully tugs at your heartstrings, then unexpectedly delivers a shocking blow that you never see coming. He is a master of horror, and no one will ever surpass his talent.

I made my husband read this after me and he couldn't put it down. A few hours later, he was ready for something else written by this Master! ♥

[Becky Spratford · Rating 5 out of 5]

STAR Review in the August 2024 issue of Booklist and on the blog (link coming)

Get ready to be devastated and entertained at the same time!

Three Words That Describe This Book: Grief Horror, Unflinching, Intense

Told through Glenn’s first person narration, readers palpably experience his pain, helplessly watching it spool out on the page, threatening to suffocate all, much like the duct tape did to Billy. For Horror readers looking for a story that provides an intense and unflinching look into grief as it morphs into terrifying obsession such as in, The Devil Takes You Home by Iglesias, In Excess of Dark by Lagoe, and Chapman’s own What Kind of Mother.


CROSSROADS by HIghtower too.

he tells a tight, suspenseful, and masterful story here.

Chapman’s latest novella has a strong connection to his last novel, What Kind of Mother, as both explore parental loss


Grief spools out like the roll of duct tape onto the page, suffocating the reader.

Grief to obsessions

Purposely meant to upset you– like Tremblay makes you feel


The connection to What Kind of Mother is STRONG.

A near perfect example of Grief Horror– the emotion is all there, raw and sticky (duct tape) and complicated and terrifying

Intense Grief Horror like Crossroads by Hightower, The Devil Takes You Home by Iglesias, In Excess of Dark by Lagoe. L. Marie Wood’s 12 Hours.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clay succeeded in ripping out my heart again. We journey with Billy's father through decades of grief, never shying away from the brutal reality of his son's murder. I don't think you can read this without being changed at the end. Bravo, Mr. Chapman. Please never stop writing.

[Amber Reu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully devastating. Clay is an absolute master at pulling you in and ripping your heart out and I wouldn’t have it any other way. KILL YOUR DARLING is grief horror at its finest.

Thank you to Bad Hand Books for a review copy.

[Ross Jeffery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clay had me from the first paragraph, and kept hold of me the whole way through…such a deeply thought provoking read, full of unrelenting grief, sadness, horror and parental trauma that never lets up.

Suffocating in more ways than one…

Brilliant. Masterful. Unrelenting.

[thevampireslibrary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story follows Glenn and Carol whose son Billy was murdered some 40 years ago, tired of her husband's moping Carol signs Glenn up to a creative writing class where he explores his grief by searching for a fictional closure to the crime, I felt this story closely mimicked what real writers do, baring their pain and trauma on the page in the hopes to have some sort of release from it, and readers also seek solace in fictional stories that we can relate too, the story is a punch to the gut as we see how individually and as a couple our protagonists deal with the death of their young son, memories of Billy are peppered throughout that just tear through the readers flesh and grab their bloody beating hearts and squeeze untill the characters desperation and pain becomes indistinguishable from our own, theres a mounting sense of urgency building throughout as Glenn gets closer to unraveling the mystery surrounding his son's death, I was completely invested and I held my breath for the last quarter, there's a lingering sense of ambiguity, did we find out the truth? Or did Glenns storytelling take on a mind of its own, was there even a creative writing group or did it all take place in his mind? (No there definitely was one I'm just going off on some metaphorical tangent) Clay is a master at creating authentic characters, stuffing as much humanity into them as possible making them extremely relatable and the reading experience incredibly immersive, it's hard to believe they are not real people but just conjured up in the mind of a literary genius, theres no mistaking this is a sombre read, even the humourous banter between our married couple feels bittersweet because the sadness beneath it is tangible, Carol and Glenn are characters that will not lightly fade from your memory after reading, I liken Clay's characters to those annoying stickers on the front of books, you just can't get rid of them, far from annoying however it shows his uncanny ability to get right inside yours and his characters noggins, a meditation on grief and the damage it can do to those left behind, themes of truth, guilt and love are explored through this deftly created story.

[Steve Stred · Rating 5 out of 5]

When this book was released, I saw the cover art was instantly intrigued. When I saw Francois Vaillancourt describe how he made the cover art in a Facebook post, I was even more intrigued, as he mentioned a little about the synopsis of this novella. First – I’m a huge fan of Francois’ work, and will forever hold the cover he did for my book ‘Mastodon’ in a special place. Second – I’ve found things have hit differently in my reading brain now that I have a son. Books like ‘The Road,’ and Andrew Pyper’s opus, ‘The Killing Circle,’ just sing differently when reading them.

So, I went into this one tentatively. Going in, I knew that a teenaged son’s body had been found in a lot, duct-tape wrapping his face with eyes drawn on with black marker. Exactly what Francois depicts on the cover. But going in, I wondered just how far I could go? Would the subject matter be too heavy?

Only one way to find out.

What I liked: The entirety of the novella focuses on Glenn, father to Billy, who was murdered fifty-ish years ago. No suspect was ever found, leads minimal. The boy was found in an abandoned lot, after going to a school dance. Since that day, Glenn has lived with the mental destruction. Who did it? Why? Why his son? And he’s lived with the discomfort of acceptance versus closure. How can he ever move on if there’s no answer? No one arrested or confessing?

As him and his wife have aged, they’ve developed their own ways of keeping their son’s memory alive. His wife leaves an extra plate out for dinner. They’ve left his room as it was. Glenn has kept a scrap book of photos and then newspaper articles.

Chapman doesn’t hold back within. It’s a tough read. Emotions are high and this feels real, feels painful to read. I can’t think of a single chapter in here – and the chapters are all short and snappy – that didn’t have me on the brink of tears, or left me crying. And I don’t think that would be any different if I wasn’t a father. It’s the reality of this book. It’s heartbreaking. I couldn’t imagine losing a child forever and also not having any answers over the ‘why’ of it happening.

Within, Glenn – on the insistence of his wife – joins a writing class at the local library. And it’s through these classes that he begins to write his story, creating a fictional ending to his non-fiction life, a way to grieve and close the horrible chapter of Billy’s death and create something tangible that will let him have closure on those dark days and on his life itself. It’s this writing class that ultimately unravels the truth and Chapman uses that revelation to crush the readers that much more.

What I didn’t like: I think the reality is, that this just might be too much for some readers. Those who’ve lost kids, lost a loved one, or simply just can’t read anything involving a child’s death. And I completely understand that. I pushed through the horrible rock that sat heavy in my stomach, even when at times that rock weighed more than anything on the surface of the earth.

Why you should buy this: Chapman delivers a stunning and ultimately moving look at grief, acceptance, life after losing someone and how a loved one’s death can have dramatic consequences on everyone involved. This could easily be read in a single sitting, though I can’t see someone emotionally wanting to tackle that. For those looking for a heavy, but powerful read, look no further. Chapman has given us a dark, dark, bleak gem here.

[Bracken · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book wrecked me! Wrecked!

[Michael Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review originally appeared on FanFiAddict.

Fresh off his work as an ethereal voice on the other end of a disconnected phone in Stay on the Line, Sean Patrick Hopkins returns to narrate the hell out of another grief-laden horror novella from Clay McLeod Chapman in Kill Your Darling.

Glenn Partridge and wife lost their 15-year-old son to a brutal murderer 40 years ago. It’s a wound that won’t heal, can never heal. Glenn’s wife signs him up for a community writing workshop in the hopes that it’ll help get him a hobby, and get him out of her hair for a little while. Rather than distract him from the obsession of his son’s death, Glenn finds it an opportunity to tell their story, or, perhaps more importantly, to tell Billy’s story. Billy’s murder has been a cold case long enough for a long line of detectives to have retired and die, none of them ever getting any closer to solving the mystery. In telling Billy’s story and unraveling the past, Glenn hopes to find answers, but does he really want the truth?

Chapman is a hell of a writer. His words come from the gut as much as they do the heart, and he’s content to use them as knives to stab at readers with an assassin’s precision. Glenn’s in his 80s. His son has been dead longer than he ever had a chance to live, but his murder took away Glenn’s life, too. The man has gotten old, but it’s been a long, slow death since losing Billy. Whatever is left of him exists only in the hopes that there might be some resolution, some bit of closure. He calls the police daily asking if there’s been any new leads while studying the last shirt his son ever wore in the hopes of scrying a blood stain the forensics team missed all those years ago. He maintains a photo album documenting every inch Billy’s too-short 15 years. He’s given over his existence to become an eternal flame in tribute to Billy. He’s married, but it’s his dead boy that defines him.

Hopkins captures this all perfectly in his reading of Chapman’s material. There’s a rough hollowness to the words spoken that echo Glenn’s loss. We feel the grief, the emptiness, the anger, leeching into Hopkins performance throughout, and the ways hope compete against hopelessness. It’s an emphatic and, more importantly, empathetic reading.

Kill Your Darling forgoes the supernatural in favor of those all-too-personal real-life horrors. The horror of loss, of the brutal murder of a child whose head was encased in a mask of duct tape and suffocated, the horror of never knowing why it happened or who did it. There are no made-up monsters, no vampires or zombies to explain it all away for us. It’s all human, the kind of horrors Chad Lutzke or Jack Ketchum largely wrote about in their too-recognizable monsters that live next door. It’s the kind of horror Clint Eastwood might have adapted to film, starring and directing in between talking to an empty chair at conventions for fascists, back when he was riding high on Gran Torino or Mystic River, if only this book had come out 20 years ago. It’s the kind of horror that’s scary because of how realistic it is, rooted so firmly as it is in the possibility of loss and tragedy and the ease with which one can lose themselves to grief.

[Casey Bee · Rating 5 out of 5]

People keep calling this “grief horror”. Is it? Is it even horror? Or just a horrible thing that happened? The content of the book is fucking hard to read and imagine. It’s sad. Devastating. Depressing. Who on earth wants to imagine the murder a 15 year old boy, and then explore that grief through the eyes of the father? I guess me, because here I am rating it 5 stars. As a mother (to a 15 year old boy actually), I’m devastated by this book. At first, I didn’t know if I could actually read it. As a human, I’m interested in the exploration of grief that it presents. How it shows up differently in different people, how it can warp us, reconfigure our memories, how it can paralyze. As an avid reader, I appreciated the exploration of the act of storytelling and the creation of the stories in the first place. For a short book, or novella I suppose, there’s a lot to unpack here and think about. And then of course the ending is a gut punch. I was prepared to rate this 4 stars, but what made me land on 5 is how actually well-written this is. While I have to backtrack and read some of Clay’s older stuff, this is the best writing (imo) I’ve seen from him. Spectacular writing, actually. I would not recommend this to everyone….the content is very difficult….but I wouldn’t hesitate at all to recommend it to the right people. An incredible work of art.

[Anna Dupre · Rating 5 out of 5]

The biggest thanks to Bad Hand Books for getting an eARC in my hands!

Another stunning addition to his already impressive catalog, Clay McLeod Chapman takes us down another dark road exploring the complexities of grief horror and the human condition with Kill Your Darling. Told from his point of view, Glenn, an elderly man, recounts his relationship with grief and loss regarding the death of his 15-year-old son, Billy, 40 some years ago. While most of his anguish-riddled musings are kept to himself, Glenn’s wife signs him up for a writing workshop, bringing forth new feelings and confrontations about Billy’s story.

Where to begin with this novella. As always, Clay manages to pack a whole lot into a short span. This is a darkly gleaming mystery riddled with grief, but on a much deeper level, it examines the vulnerabilities of the things humans create. Glenn’s relationship with his deceased son is complex and full of speculation of the most horrific kind. Billy’s case remaining unsolved for so long has haunted Glenn in a deeply personal way as he catalogs what he can to maybe find closure. This all takes a turn when he begins this writing workshop.

The advice to write what you know takes a very different meaning for Glenn whose life has revolved around the last unknown hours of Billy’s life. The result is something startling as what Glenn knows best is what he doesn’t know, his mind is a dark maze of possibilities and projections. Chapman writes with raw emotion that creates a foreboding tone of anguish as well as providing a unique commentary on writing. As Glenn struggles to write, there’s equal amounts of strife associated with sharing the story of Billy. It feels like a very Stephen King piece of writing on writing, detailing the deepest parts of being a vulnerable human.

KYD is an unflinching examination of staring into the abyss, filling voids that stem from the biggest parts of yourself. Chapman’s writing has never been sharper, his timing immaculately precise to keep you yearning for closure right alongside Glenn.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since his son's body was found, head concealed in duct tape, nearly 40 years ago, Glenn Partridge hasn't been able to rest or let things go. He's constantly pestered the police and created a scrapbook with every thought about his son and what or who might have caused his fate. Much to his chagrin, his wife has signed him up for a creative writing course with a local published author. Encouraged to write what he knows, his son Billy is all that Glenn knows. But will writing about him bring him some closure, or bring something worse out of the past.
Though just novella length, this story feels like a full sized novel, a full-fledged meditation on grief and the inability to let go. Chapman's prose is greatly evocative and lets you feel all the emotions that overwhelm Glenn, from his reticence in the writing workshop to his obsession with needing answers, though possibly not wanting the real truth. Kill Your Darling is another sharp kick in the guts from Chapman. 4.5/5*

[Chris DiLeo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa. I haven’t been so enthralled by any book the way I was by this one in a long time. Chapman weaves a tale of grief, obsession, and storytelling that is astounding and so well written it makes me question why I bother trying to write. A must read! Buy direct from Bad Hand Books!

[Mona Kabbani · Rating 4 out of 5]

That ending was gutting. For such a short work, it packs quite the punch.

[David Washburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

*exhales and simmers in breathlessness*
This book is heavy as ffffff…
In 200 pages Clay managed to make me somehow relate to a 77 year-old man who lost his son 40 years ago. Being that I’m a father of boys this hit me super hard. The story doesn’t hold any punches in an emotional sense. The main character carries a bitter old man energy throughout but it’s draped in sadness as you see how he justifies everything about his life and decisions with consideration to his son.

His wife also coped, but differently and it was so interesting peeling back the curtain of this old couple’s life.

The chapter titles were so clever and subtle but still relevant and something about that to me made me absorb this story in a very musical sense. I’m a person who doesn’t hear a song, but rather I experience it and find ways to attach my life to it. This old man was finding ways to relate things to his son and it gave the same feeling reading as I might get hearing a song and just feeling it.

Clay captures a cadence in Kill Your Darling that you can’t look away from and now all I’m going to do is sit with this feeling. I feel like I just witnessed something I had no business seeing.

[Micah Castle]

Probably one of the bleakest and saddest books I've ever read.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a tough read at times. In the book, Siobhan said during the writing group it was “vivid” and I have to agree. But, unlike her, I loved it.

[Leigh Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wowzers!

What a phenomenal read! Chapman's writing is so wonderfully crisp, so vivid. There were lines that seemed so innocent in their simplicity that would suddenly hit me like a sledgehammer. This story is as heavy as it is heartbreaking, and those little moments of joy and humour only served to add weight to the rest. This didn't feel like fiction. It felt like Chapman was writing about a lived experience. It broke me.

I googled the NYT article that inspired the story and it only served to break my heart all over again. If you haven't read Clay McLeod Chapman yet, you are missing out hugely.

Now, off I go to inhale everything he's ever written.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone paying attention to Clay McLeod Chapman’s latest string of bangers should know what they’re in for: seemingly realistic settings skewing into the fantastic, fully fleshed characters trying to deal with the weirdness, and most likely a healthy dose of grief.

Grief horror, or the filtering of the grieving process through the lens of horror, is enough of a trend to have earned itself a name, and there should be nothing too surprising about this. Horror is a cathartic genre, and grief is that true universal catharsis, the horror that will come for all eventually. And if there is a poster boy for the genre, it almost has to be Chapman, a writer who is endlessly adept at entertaining us while bumming us the hell out.

For Kill Your Darling, he leaves a lot of the trappings of his other recent forays behind. There is no ghostly crab child, no haunted telephone booth, not even a hint of the weird or supernatural to help the medicine go down. This is grief unfiltered by artifice.

Or so it seems.

Because Kill Your Darling is really a book about art, about storytelling and its relation to trauma. Glenn Partridge’s attempts to make sense of his teenage son’s brutal murder give shape to the book, and to Glenn’s obsessions. They transform a loose collection of facts, memories, and theories into a grand narrative, a narrative that comes to take the place of his missing son.

When his wife signs him up for a writing course at the local library, this web of ideas and images is forced into something more cohesive, into a narrative, something that necessarily requires a conclusion, or in the language of grief: closure.

It’s a bravura feat, even if the going is rough. From the first pages, the book is brutal in its descriptions of the crime, but that brutality pales before the portrait of a family that has been fractured and settled into a kind of suspended animation for four decades. That Glenn’s story finally shakes up that suspended state can almost be read as a celebration of the power of art.

Almost.

It might also be a diagnosis of the writer, the artist, of all of those who work to shape meaning out of the chaos of the world, obsessively trying to make it make sense, one word at a time, and holding up those rare moments when the pieces seem to come together into something real.

[Scott Rizzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kill Your Darling may have just become my favorite Clay McLeod Chapman book to date. I could not stop reading, a single day book for me.

It tells the story of a man (and his wife) that has not been able to move on from the brutal murder of his son and rightfully so. It has been decades since and he still hopes for answers to who killed his boy. He is entered into a creative writing class by his wife to help him find something to occupy his mind.

Chapman captures the grief and emotional rollercoaster A parent endures in such a horrible situation perfectly. This will be my new immediate recommendation to anyone who will listen to me.

[Lucian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapman is so good at making me want to just sit down and read his works beginning to end in a day. His stories are always interesting and though I enjoy some more than others he is a writer to count on delivering entertainment. Kill Your Darling is an interesting piece of grief horror and I also felt that it’s some horror of being trapped inside of your own mind. A fast and powerful read that I might need to revisit for another read.

[Wayne Fenlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an easy five stars. What an absolute belter of a story. One of the best I've read this year. I think this one will be in the running for some awards.
Glad I picked this one up. Even better that I had no clue what it was about.
Go in blind.
But uh... not with tape over your eyes.

[unstable.books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clay writes grief horror so well, no notes.

[AgoraphoBook Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just Clay being Clay and slaying away.
5 stars

[LordTBR · Rating 4 out of 5]

When grief begets obsession begets insanity, how do you ever crawl back into the skin which was once yours… or can you?