Herculine

About the book

One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025

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A ‘witty, often-chilling, compulsively readable’ (Vogue) horror debut following a woman who seeks refuge at an all-trans girl commune only to discover that demons 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.

Praise for this book:

"Like Byron herself, Herculine's protagonist, an aspiring writer who looks up to the Hot Freelance Girls (her nickname for the trans women writers who enjoyed a brief window of upward mobility back in the Buzzfeed and Jezebel days, when Representation Mattered), lives in the shadow of the now-defunct Topside Press literary scene, of which Torrey [Peters] is perhaps the best-known member. Though it deals in demons rather than vaccines, Herculine shares with Infect [Your Friends and Loved Ones] cult dynamics contrasted with the sad suspicion that T4T isn't the nostrum that some would have us believe." - Davey Davis

"I devoured Herculine - a sharp, fast-paced nightmare glittering with insight about desire, trauma, and the unique joys and disappointments of t4t intimacy. In a literary landscape long-plagued by bloodless depictions of contemporary transsexual life, Herculine splashes onto the scene sparkling red and wreathed in viscera." - Max Delsohn

"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

"Devious and diabolical, Herculine is a jaw-dropping and completely unpredictable literary bewitchment about trauma, desire, and identity. One of the most artful and stunning debuts I've read this year. This book is irreverent, playful, and utterly irresistible." - Eric LaRocca

"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

"Visceral and hypnotic, a novel with stars in its guts. It takes place both in the wilderness and in the new future we are trying to build." - Patricia Lockwood

"Grace Byron's literally unforgettable Herculine pulses with surprise, intelligence, and tension. Here we have a novel of the mind and heart alike, a trans horror story of marooning and discovery that can make the reader both shudder and laugh out loud, and the arrival of a major new voice." - Sarah Thankam Mathews

"Provocative and poetic. Herculine evokes the tradition of grungy queer lit, decked out with infernal style and slick with the poison of isolation." - Hailey Piper

"Punchy, strange, and sneakily poignant without trying to be overly ironic, Herculine doubles both as a novel and as trans literary criticism." - Brandon Taylor

"Beyond the lovebombing occultists, hobnobbing freelancers, and God-haunted transplants, Herculine is about the search for true belonging - to be accepted not for your identity or status, but for your scars. In Grace Byron's phenomenal novel of trauma, sex, and other night terrors, we see the blood price of utopia, and the sacrifices necessary for salvation." - Tony Tulathimutte