Slashers are the backbone of society, but as we reach further and further into the genre for new ideas, its final girls seem to be taking a bit of a reputation hit — but now, they’re fighting back. FANGORIA is excited to reveal the cover for Elle Engel’s new slasher novel, He Always Comes Back, along with a short excerpt from the book, which hits shelves in February.
Billed as a slasher in the vein of Scream or fellow author Riley Sager’s novels, He Always Comes Back is Engel’s debut novel, after her short story “Half Sick of Shadows” was published in Strange Horizons in 2024. Featuring an embossed naked hardcover and blood-drip sprayed edges, the book’s synopsis is as follows:
A year after surviving the massacre that claimed six of her friends, Billie Danvers is still drowning in guilt, dodging the morbid curiosity of strangers, and searching for answers about that fatal night. But when the killer who upended her life, Carson Cutler, resurfaces and attacks her adoptive family, Billie learns a terrifying truth: she’s a Kirkbride, the youngest daughter in a bloodline of women hunted by Cutler for generations.
Every few years, he returns to the Kirkbride family to finish what he started. He kills everyone around them and leaves the Kirkbride women alive to suffer—at least until the next attack.
Determined to break the cycle, Billie and her adoptive sister Lulu head to Kirktown, Billie’s ancestral home turned true-crime tourist trap, in search of answers. But the deeper they dig into the Kirkbride history, the clearer it becomes that Cutler’s legacy runs deeper—and darker—than anyone imagined.
Hailing from Abrams Books, He Always Comes Back is part of their new akaSTORY imprint, focusing on “propulsive, of-the-moment fiction across all genres.” While Engel’s novel is the imprint’s first horror book (they’ve mostly published romances up to this point), it also joins Kelly Young Chang’s thriller The Sins of Good People. For more horror book recommendations, you can also check out our article on the best spinechilling stories hitting shelves this fall.
He Always Comes Back publishes on February 23, 2027, and is available for preorder now. Read our exclusive excerpt below:
