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Herculine

A Novel

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About The Book

Manhunt meets Lord of the Flies in this blistering horror debut following a young trans woman after she arrives at the all-trans girl commune founded by her toxic ex-girlfriend, only to discover that demons, both literal and figurative, haunt her fellow comrades—and she's their next prey!

Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story—conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes—but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.

The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own.

While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.

About The Author

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Bookforum, The Nation, LARB, Lux, Screen Slate, frieze, Hyperallergic, Joyland, The Believer, AnOther, and The Baffler among other outlets. She is a 2024 Queer Art Fellow and her story “Validity” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Product Details

  • Publisher: S&S/Saga Press (October 7, 2025)
  • Length: 272 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781668087886

Raves and Reviews

"Truly wonderful. While the world falls apart, reading horror is like anti-venom, a small offering of poison to counteract a greater poison that seeks to destroy you.”
—Lilly Wachowski, co-creator of The Matrix and Sense8

"Wildly surprising, slyly funny, and in all ways an excellent novel. Whether or not you’ve ever made a compact with a demon for the thing you wanted most, Grace Byron’s Herculine is the real deal."
—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

"Byron's debut is a haunting portrait of disaffected, dysfunctional adulthood and the human devastation left behind by fundamentalist Christian upbringing. On its face, Herculine is an almost prototypical novel about a young trans woman trying to make it in New York, but with each new nasty revelation, Byron pulls you deeper into a world of paranoid, self-annihilating horror."
—Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt and Cuckoo







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