Headlights turns – CJ Leede’s Headlights, releasing June 9 at $28.99, dresses grief in the mechanics of a crime thriller—then steadily makes the search for answers feel like the discovery of unbearable loss.
The first thing that hits in CJ Leede’s Headlights isn’t the violence—it’s the way a case can crawl under your skin and refuse to let go.
Special Agent Daniel Stansfield returns to Denver on what should have been his last day with the FBI. He’s back 4 years after a case he failed to bury emotionally or professionally. People are disappearing on highways. stripped of memory. and their disappearances are connected to gruesome murders they insist they know nothing about. Stolen skin. strands of hair tied around tongues. bodies reduced into nothing but bags of evidence—clues that don’t just point toward something monstrous. but toward something incomprehensible.
Headlights wraps that setup in the familiar motion of procedural mystery. But reducing it to either a crime thriller or a horror novel doesn’t hold. Beneath the investigation and the mounting sense of supernatural dread is something far more intimate: grief that becomes a permanent environment.
Leede writes Daniel with bruised vulnerability instead of the usual armor of a hardened investigator. He isn’t immune to fear, or to emotional collapse. He is fractured—carrying years of accumulated hurt that bleeds into every interaction and decision. And what could have been treated as tragic backstory is given weight as haunting material. Leede’s Daniel isn’t just hunting answers. He’s confronting the possibility that grief and guilt themselves can consume a person whole.
The story’s most unsettling power is how it moves from grounded investigation into something increasingly harrowing and surreal without rushing the shift. Leede begins by placing readers in the familiar territory of solving a crime, then slowly destabilizes reality itself. As Daniel goes deeper into the case, certainty dissolves. The line between psychological horror and something supernatural becomes terrifyingly thin. until the experience feels suffocatingly inevitable—like revelations are guiding Daniel. and the reader. toward something unknowable and impossible to escape.
Colorado becomes part of the pressure. Leede transforms frozen roads and isolated wilderness into liminal spaces suspended between life and death, memory and nightmare. The highways themselves land as symbolic—endless paths cutting through darkness. carrying people toward destinations they may not survive long enough to reach. Even quiet moments crackle with tension. threaded with a persistent feeling that something is waiting just at the edges of perception. patiently observing.
And for all its brutality, Headlights never turns emotionally hollow or cynical. There’s compassion thrumming beneath the horror. Leede writes about pain with startling honesty while still acknowledging the human need for connection amid suffering. The novel examines how grief can make people feel alone. and how trauma convinces us we are too damaged to be understood—yet it refuses to leave characters trapped entirely inside that despair. Tender threads run through the darkness. showing up in small. deeply affecting moments of vulnerability between people simply trying to make it through.
The title itself becomes symbolic as the story goes on. shaping the emotional core without giving away where it’s headed. The horror imagery is undeniably mean and grotesque at times. and Leede doesn’t spare visceral details—but the violence doesn’t feel built for shock value. Instead, every disturbing moment reinforces the emotional themes under the narrative. The body horror reads as extension of emotional violation, identities fractured by trauma and grief. Even when the novel turns dreamlike, it maintains recognizable human emotion.
That balance matters: stories about trauma often chase bleakness as depth. but Leede makes it clear hope and despair can coexist. The darkest moments land with force precisely because there’s a fragile possibility of comfort beyond them. By the final pages, Headlights reads like an elegy for wounded people trying to survive the unbearable.
The book’s ending arrives unexpected and heartfelt—painful and beautiful at the same time—and it carries an elegiac sense of loneliness and longing, the feeling of trying to be pulled back to the light before disappearing completely.
Headlights is described, in part, as one for fans of The Shining. The review copy available for this discussion came via Tor Nightfire, and the title is set for release June 9. It carries an MSRP of $28.99 and is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble, Powells, or your local independent book store.
CJ Leede Headlights horror novel crime thriller grief Daniel Stansfield Denver FBI highway disappearances body horror Tor Nightfire
So is this like real FBI stuff or just vibes? Headlights sounds creepy.
I feel like they’re saying it’s horror but also procedural? Like which one is it because the description keeps jumping. “strands of hair tied around tongues” is insane though.
Daniel Stansfield returning to Denver for what was supposed to be his last day with the FBI… that’s literally how my cousin got fired, like he “failed to bury emotionally” too. Not saying this is the same thing, but it sounded way too real. Also “people are disappearing on highways” sounds like a true crime documentary setup.
“Dresses grief in the mechanics of a crime thriller” is a wild sentence. I skimmed and thought it was about car headlights like literally driving at night. Then it turns into murder bags of evidence and supernatural dread? Idk, I might still read it if it’s $28.99 worth of pain.