Snake-Eater was going to ruin something, I knew that going in. A House With Good Bones ruined ladybugs. The Hollow Places gave me some real concerns about willow trees. Hemlock and Silver made me suspicious of my own reflection. It’s just a requirement of any T. Kingfisher horror novel that something mundane become viscerally upsetting. This time? Roadrunners.

Yes, the same bird that inspired the cartoon. If you grew up watching a speedy little guy stick out his tongue before zooming off, foiling all of the coyote’s traps, you’ll know that’s a tall order. Roadrunners are cute, right?

No. Roadrunners, as the book, in the end, does not have to work that hard to convince us, are prehistoric remnants still roaming the earth. Like sharks, they are superior predators whose superior adaptations simply hasn’t needed any evolving. Or so I can only assume, based on the vicious effectiveness of the little bastards as they torment our hero Selena and her goodest boy Copper.

Selena is the newest and least intentional resident of Quartz Creek, New Mexico, after fleeing an abusive relationship with only a few belongings and her beloved Labrador. She has no resources and little family to call upon, just the one aunt in this out-of-the-way town where the postmaster, fire chief, and police chief are all the same person. But just as she thinks she might have found refuge, strange things begin to happen around her. Dim figures haunt her doorways. Glaring eyes and presences persist through her dreams and into her waking life.

T. Kingfisher continues to innovate with the haunted house trope, since this time the house is not itself a problem so much as a locus of a problem. Selena is besieged by an entity within and without, but the house itself, during lulls, is perfectly safe. It’s only the roadrunners, the snake-eaters, who are the problem, but what’s their connection to the home? What has Selena done or not done to earn their ire?

Selena’s interior anxiety-monologue and her scripting of conversations is 100% relatable and accurate. I wonder if other readers who have never experienced the crippling combination of low self-esteem and anxiety disorder will find it frustrating? Perhaps, but I can only assure you that, beyond accuracy, it is also frustrating to Selena and to all of us who have experienced it as well.

Selena stands in contrast to, say, Sam from A House with Good Bones, whose confidence was awesome to read. But for anyone struggling with Selena’s, well, struggles, know that she does find her footing in Quartz Creek. Slowly but surely, her troubles force her to connect with her neighbors, almost as much as her neighbors press the issue and refuse not to connect with her.

As usual, I love the Persnickety Auntie who tends to be a staple of Kingfisher’s novels. Grandma Billy is a particular delight, just as charmingly inappropriate and decisively effective as you could want from the local matriarch. And no, she doesn’t have kids, but what does that matter? She’s definitely the presiding mama hen of Quartz Creek, the chicken comparison very much intended. Like the Dust-wife in Nettle and Bone, Grandma Billy keeps a flock, with one particularly demonic chicken presiding over them, though in this case I don’t think the demonic part is literal.

Father Aguirre, a highly pragmatic priest, rounds out our little band of heroes for this book, with another reliably quirky cast of secondary characters to back them up. Together, they help Selena navigate the world outside her bad relationship, which is so much bigger than she ever could have (or wanted to) imagine.

As is usual for many of her novels, Kingfisher reflects masterfully on the complexities of abuse and trauma, and focuses on slowly building a community that I guess we’re calling “found family” now, although I personally prefer “like-minded weirdos.”

The ending was perhaps not my favorite among Kingfisher’s oeuvre. Narratively, you have to have resolution on the thing that brought Selena to town, but in practice it felt a little pat. final chapter, though, is a lovely little bow on the book, a “the story goes on but the book is finished” coda. I was happy to leave Serena, Copper, and the rest of Quartz Creek to the care of their local entities, and to each other.

Snake-Eater will be released December 1, 2025.