Dating & Dismemberment

Emily Henry meets Grady Hendrix in the funniest and most and original romantic comedy of the year: a monstrously feel good cozy fantasy full of love, laughter, lore, and limbs.

Darla Drake, Duchess of Death, is a legendary monster who has haunted the woods around Camp Clear Creek for years. But when an existential crisis forces her to take a sabbatical from wreaking havoc on teenagers, Darla must figure out what she really wants from the rest of her (possibly infinite) life. So what does a monster do when her malevolent days are over? For Darla, it’s spending time with the decapitated—yet still overbearing—head of her mother, Dolores, reading romance novels she steals from campers, and struggling with one monstrous case of melancholy. Until Jarko Murkvale arrives in Clear Creek and turns Darla’s life upside down.

Jarko is a conceited, arrogant, infuriating, and unfortunately for Darla, kind of hot. And with the Duchess of Death on the shelf, Jarko has staked his claim on Camp Clear Creek. But Darla refuses to go down without a fight, and so in order to reclaim her territory she challenges Jarko to a series of hunts to see who the most fearsome monster really is.

But the more mayhem they cause, the more Darla begins to realize there’s more to this brash monster than she believed…and that Jarko may just be the antidote to her ennui. But there’s a reason Jarko came to Clear Creek, and in order to fill her nine-chambered heart, Darla will have to unravel the mystery of who this closed-off monster really is. And if they can manage to not literally tear each other limb from limb, Darla and Jarko just might find that couples who slay together, stay together.