Black Flame
Gretchen Felker-Martin
(Author)
This title will be released on:
Aug 5, 2025
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
| Publisher | Tor Nightfire |
| Publish Date | August 05, 2025 |
| Pages | 208 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781250348012 |
| Dimensions | 209.6 X 136.5 X 0.6 mm | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Praise for Black Flame
"Nasty, erotic, kinky, vicious, suspenseful....Felker-Martin uses the trope of the cursed movie and creates something utterly unique that manages to horrify, beguile, and empower in equal measure. If you are going to read one horror book this year, make it this one."
—JOHANNA VAN VEEN, author of My Darling Dreadful Thing
"Black Flame is a literary razor blade raked right over the reader's eyeballs, Un Chien Adalouing the shit out us with nearly every page. Gretchen Felker-Martin is ready for her close-up, and this book further testifies to her blood red reign as horror's enfant terrible."
—CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
"Felker-Martin’s stunning prose is equal parts grotesque and lyrical as she turns an unflinching gaze on the extremes of compulsion and desire on the way to a truly devastating climax. The story threads the difficult needle of presenting unsympathetic characters and complicated relationships without compromising its vision, and the results are spectacular."
—Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)
Praise for Gretchen Felker-Martin
"Cuckoo is, like Felker-Martin's previous novel Manhunt, absolutely masterful."
—ROXANE GAY, New York Times bestselling author of The Bad Feminist
"Manhunt is a modern horror masterpiece.”
—CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of National Book Award finalist Her Body and Other Parties
"With [Cuckoo], Felker-Martin appoints herself the new High Priestess of splatter....A story of love, hate, and sacrifice that spares no suffering, but takes no pity."
—TONY TULATHIMUTTE, author of National Book Award finalist Rejection
“Disgustingly rendered and brilliantly imagined…. A fresh, stomach-turning take on gendered apocalypse.”
—NPR on Manhunt
"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, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie
“A grisly, gory, glorious work of splatterpunk social horror — and the perfect introduction to both subgenres.”
—BUSTLE on Manhunt
“Tense and frighteningly visceral, Cuckoo is a masterwork of body horror thrumming with high octane viciousness.”
—ERIC LAROCCA, author of At Dark, I Become Loathsome
“Felker-Martin can write: Manhunt expertly drops one political target after another, breaks your heart with nearly every character, and keeps up a relentless velocity— all while just being plain fun as hell.”
—TORREY PETERS, PEN/Hemingway Award winning author of Detransition, Baby
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