9781915368799

28/11/24

PB

256 pages

“Full of menace and delight.”
Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“Where there is glamour, there is terror in this self-assured debut collection. In 10 eerie stories, Valencia leans into the horror and grit under a shiny world.”
Kirkus Reviews

“With cinematic sensibilities, Valencia excels at blurring the lines between the literary and the commercial. Mystery Lights is a genre-bending debut collection by short story master Lena Valencia that follows its characters down the paths of chaotic transformations, both real and imagined.”
Shelf Awareness

An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage UFO enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an SUV with a strange man beside her. Set primarily in deserts throughout the American Southwest, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is a debut collection of stories about women and girls at the crossroads of mundane daily life and existential dread. From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Mystery Lights grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic, introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us.