Headlights by CJ Leede
Synopsis
Every instinct tells him to run. Every memory tells him he can’t.
Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it’s happening again.
Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they’ve allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.
Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along— before he and the people he loves become the next victims.
Headlights is both a heartfelt examination on grief and a love letter to Stephen King’s The Shining in this pulse-pounding hunt across the frozen wilderness of Colorado by bestselling author CJ Leede.
Overall Rating
5/5
Spooky Rating
3/5
Gore Rating
4/5
Quick Take
CJ Leede has this uncanny ability to touch your heart while instantaneously shredding it pieces. Headlights is no different. As a multi-generational Coloradoan, this book touched me on a deep level – but it wasn’t just because of the setting. The grief and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) portrayal cut me to my core and left me with a sense of healing and understanding.
Tell Me More
I have been following CJ Leede’s work since Maeve Fly first came out. I distinctly remember reading THAT scene while in line for a concert and ended up thinking more about the book than paying attention to the concert I was attending (if you know, you know – if you don’t know READ IT).
This is a testament to what a captivating horror writer Leede is, especially when it comes to splatterpunk elements paired with brilliant character development and heartwrenching topics. She puts intense research and lived experience into her books and it shows. But there was something about Headlights that set it apart from Maeve Fly or American Rapture.
It seemed to be filled with more heart than ferocity, more sadness than rage, and damn was it good.
Horror, in my opinion, is the ideal genre for exploring grief and Leede hit the horror of grief on the head. This time, her book got me through some serious health concerns and hospital stays and I can’t thank her enough.
Headlights follows Daniel Stansfield, who is burnt out from his job as an FBI agent. However, he ends up being pulled back to Denver due to events that are happening again – and in turn is pulled back into the pain of his past.
“I feel him watching me, getting a whole picture. How fucked up I am, how much I can’t get past anything in my life. How Josie dodged a big fuckin’ bullet by getting away from me.”
John Denver’s music and his autobiography are a big part of Daniel’s story, which touched me because of how my mother has always been a John Denver fanactic. I grew up listening to his music constantly. The music connects Daniel to his own mother, and while John Denver was not a perfect person by any means, Leede touches on how this in itself was a big healing factor for Daniel.
“Nothing ever made me feel as safe as a kid as his songs did. I’m not excusing his behavior – you can’t – but people I knew as a kid, things I’d seen. Something about knowing that even people who might not be all good could give a lot of good to the world anyway… it made me feel hope.”
The book takes you on a road trip through Colorado, and touches on so many elements that Leede got strikingly right. Especially with how crowded and congested this state has become. This breaks my heart constantly having grown up here and being a multigenerational “pioneer.” I carry grief with this in and of itself.
“I remember when I was a kid. Teachers telling us Denver’s population was under five hundred thousand. Who are all these people? Where did they come from? And why are they settling here? House after house, yard after yard. Matching. All of it slipping, sliding, blurring at the edges.”
Daniel’s journey throughout the book is largely a journey through and into his grief and PTSD, paired with battling supernatural forces and coming to grips with them. But it’s also about living in this darkness of mental health concerns, and the truth that is so hard to talk about. How you get used to this feeling of darkness, this void, and sometimes growing through and out of it can cause a sense of loss in itself.
“When you’ve lived in the dark, survived it, it’s hard sometimes to explain to others. Really explain how it’s with you every second. How it is everything. How you’re battling all the time, how you don’t want to battle it at all. How a part of you grows to know it so completely you don’t want it to go.”
Leede talking about how this book was deeply connected to her experience with grief (she teared up during her author talk) makes so much sense. Daniel is filled with despair and grief from the beginning of the novel but somehow comes out on the other side by the end of the book.
It was a novel that fully tore the reader through Daniel’s journey in a way that described this grief and PTSD in ways that those who haven’t experienced them can understand.
While also extending a hand and hug to those who have and saying:
I am here, I’ve been there, I am there, and you aren’t alone.
“But I just think sometimes this world is a kind place. We can’t give up hope yet.”
Headlights is a gift Leede gave to those of us who have been there, who are still there, and those who need help understanding how these themes are impacting loved ones.
Thank you, CJ. You did it again.
*Thank you to Tor Nightfire for the ARC
Rating Scales for Reference
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