Black Flame bookcover

Black Flame

This title will be released on

calendar iconAugust 5, 2025

4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

One woman's deadly obsession with a haunted archival film precipitates her undoing in Black Flame, from the USA Today bestselling author of Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin.

A cursed film. A haunted past. A deadly secret.

The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her.

As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control.

Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind.

Do you want it?
More than anything?

Also by Gretchen Felker-Martin:
Manhunt
Cuckoo

Product Details

PublisherTor Nightfire
Publish DateAugust 05, 2025
Pages208
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781250348012
Dimensions209.6 X 136.5 X 1.0 mm | 1.0 pounds

About the Author

GRETCHEN FELKER-MARTIN is a Massachusetts-based bestselling horror author and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, was named the #1 Best Book of 2022 by Vulture, and was one of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 by Esquire, Library Journal, and Paste. Her sophomore novel, Cuckoo, debuted on the USA Today bestseller list. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon and in TIME, The Outline, Nylon, and more.

Reviews

Praise for Cuckoo
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER

"Cuckoo is, like Felker-Martin's previous novel Manhunt, absolutely masterful. It is gory and horrifying and brash. It is a parable slicked with blood and viscera. It is a condemnation of the ways the world tries to force queer people to become shadows of themselves by abandoning who they are. This book will leave you gasping and yearning, and it will stay on your mind long after you turn the last page."
ROXANE GAY, New York Times bestselling author of The Bad Feminist

"Cuckoo is a breathtaking novel of body horror; a heartbreaking, angry, terrifying, unflinching indictment of Christian America's cruelty; and it's a soaring, boundless ode to queer survival. It's flat-out mesmerizing."
PAUL TREMBLAY, author of The Pallbearers Club

"Cuckoo is a cry of grief and rage and, at its heart, a tribute to the queers who cup their hands around the guttering flame of hope and refuse to let it die. Brutal, relentless, terrifying, startlingly beautiful—I dare you to put this novel down.”
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of Her Body and Other Parties

"Beyond being just a really fucking good horror novel, Cuckoo is monumentally important. Felker-Martin wrote a gut-twisting banger of a book that makes fleshy the anti-trans movement."
CHELSEA G. SUMMERS, author ofA Certain Hunger

“Tense and frighteningly visceral, Cuckoo is a masterwork of body horror thrumming with the high octane viciousness of a Richard Laymon novel while maintaining the literary sophistication of a piece penned by Clive Barker or Poppy Z. Brite.”
ERIC LAROCCA, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“Vividly gruesome and carefully observed, Cuckoo will be splattered across the inside of your skull long after you’ve set it down. Beneath the viscera and relentless prose, a vital heart beats within.”
ANDREW F. SULLIVAN, author of The Marigold

"An instantly absorbing battle cry. Felker-Martin nests seamless psychic links with Lisa Tuttle and Stephen King, forming her unique nightmarish bear trap and fighting it with sustained, justified rage. Through all of Cuckoo's visceral brutality, it's the moments of kindness and bravery that broke my heart."
HAILEY PIPER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author ofQueen of Teeth

"Cuckoo is vile, repulsive, putrid, and utterly without restraint—a relentless assault on the senses. I devoured every word, and they devoured me. Filthy, degenerate art at its finest."
HIRON ENNES, author of Leech

"This vivid, unsettling, character-rich novel grabs you by the throat and won't let go."
LUCY A. SNYDER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Sister, Maiden, Monster

"Cuckoo is a nest of guts so red and inviting you'll find yourself slurping out of it like pasta before you know what's in your mouth. No other author can make the beautiful so grotesque, nor the grotesque so beautiful."
MEG ELISON, author of Number One Fan

“I’ve been waiting impatiently for Felker-Martin’s next book since the millisecond I put down Manhunt and I wasn’t disappointed. Cuckoo is equal parts intensely tender and turbulently gross. Well-observed, enthrallingly paced, and downright brutal exactly where it needs to be.”
MATTIE LUBCHANSKY, author of Boys Weekend

"Cuckoo is the gory, gooey, visceral horror story our present moment demands. It's an exploration of survival and loss in the teeth of interlocking material systems of violence like transphobia, homophobia, and racism. And it's also a radically queer homage to—or reimagining of!—some much-beloved genre classics, likeInvasion of the Body Snatchers."
LEE MANDELO, author of Summer Sons

Praise for Manhunt

#1 Best Book of 2022 (Vulture) • A Best Horror Novel of All Time (Cosmopolitan) • One of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 (Esquire, Library Journal, Paste, and CrimeReads) • A Top 10 Horror Debuts of 2022 (Booklist) • A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best HorrorA Best Book of 2022 (Reactor) • A Best SFF Book of 2022 (Gizmodo)

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