Scream meets Stephen King in this fast paced debut YA horror novel about a girl trying to survive a world where becoming a werewolf is a contagious disease.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Moonsick by Tom O’Donnell, which releases on September 23rd 2025.
High school senior Heidi Mills seemingly has it all: a charming (arrogant) boyfriend, loving (wealthy) parents, and an acceptance letter to Harvard (well, not yet). With her mom and stepdad away on vacation, she’s going to host a rager at their mansion to celebrate the end of high school.
The party is tomorrow. But the full moon is tonight—when the worldwide werewolf epidemic that has run rampant for the past few years turns deadly, and the infected transform into beasts.
Safe in her home, with its state-of-the-art lockdown system to keep the monsters out, Heidi expects to wait out the night. But when two intruders show up to rob what they think will be an empty home, the life of privilege, ease, and safety that Heidi has taken for granted comes crashing down. Suddenly exposed to the realities of this virus and the way that the rest of the world has been living all this time, Heidi embarks on a dark adventure accompanied by the mysterious–but intriguing–boy who broke into her house. As she fights to survive the underbelly of a post-pandemic society, she’ll learn that not all monsters have fangs.
With flourishes of Wes Craven and The Purge, this comedic horror novel is perfect for fans Grady Hendrix, Adam Cesare, and things that go bump in the night.
EXCERPT
Heidi’s eyes popped open. She turned to look at her bedroom clock. 2:31 am.
The house was quiet. Except . . . it wasn’t. Heidi heard something. Movement. From down the hall. She reached for her phone.
Fuck. No phone. Heidi felt sick when she remembered it was stuffed in the couch cushions downstairs. She lay in bed, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling. Listening. Maybe . . . maybe she’d imagined the sound?
No. She heard it again. Someone was in her house.
Heidi felt a surge of panic. She tried to push the feeling down. She couldn’t lose her head. She had to get out of the house before the intruder found her.
Quietly, Heidi rolled out of bed. She crouched on her be room rug for a moment and tried to control her breathing. Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t get them to stop.
Heidi silently opened her bedroom door and watched and listened. A moment later, she saw the indirect beam of a flashlight at the end of the hallway. Someone was in her mom’s room. She heard the sound of a drawer being dumped out and its contents being picked through.
Maybe, while they were occupied, she could escape.
As quickly as she dared, Heidi crept down the carpeted hall to the stairs. Trying not to make a sound, she carefully lifted herself over the nineteenth and the fourth steps, both known to creak. As she got to the ground floor, she heard a male voice swear upstairs. Apparently, he hadn’t found what he was looking for. She hoped he wouldn’t give up yet, that he would keep looking.
Her plan was to get out the back door and run to the Washburns’ next door. Keeping as low as she could, Heidi started to inch across the living room on all fours. As she moved through the darkened room, her hand touched something that shouldn’t be there—hard leather. It was a boot.
Heidi looked up. She saw the faint silhouette of a man standing in her living room. Two people had broken into her house. In the slanting moonlight, a revolver glinted in his hand.
“Not so fast, bitch,” he whispered.
The man grabbed Heidi by the hair and dragged her back up the stairs to the master bedroom, where his accomplice was tossing out the contents of her mother’s armoire.
In the eerie, indirect glow of the flashlight, Heidi could see the other burglar was roughly her age. He wore a ski mask pulled up onto the top of his head like a knit cap. She had the strange sense she recognized him from somewhere.
“Can’t find the silver,” he said without looking up. “We got a bigger problem,” said the man with the gun.
The one with the flashlight turned. As he finally noticed Heidi, he did a double take and quickly yanked his ski mask down over his face.
“What the fuck?” he said.
The man with the gun, who also wore his ski mask up on his head, shoved Heidi to the floor.
“Scream and you die,” he said, pointing his gun at her face. “Please don’t hurt me,” Heidi managed to whimper.
“Stop that,” snapped the burglar with the flashlight at his partner. “And pull your mask down, for God’s sake.”
The one with the gun fumblingly pulled his ski mask down over his face and then had to adjust it because the eyeholes were in the wrong place.
Meanwhile, Flashlight crouched beside Heidi and spoke in a calm voice. “Forget him. He’s an idiot. We’re not here to hurt anybody, okay? You’re gonna be fine.”
“I didn’t see anything,” said Heidi, deliberately looking at the floor now. “I didn’t see your faces.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“Goddamn it,” cried the one with the gun. “She can ID us!” “One moment, please,” Flashlight said to Heidi.
Then he and his partner with the gun stepped aside to confer. Heidi had a sickening feeling that this conversation, these next few moments, would decide her fate. They were trying to whisper, but she could hear every word.
Flashlight took a deep breath. “Let me repeat: What the fuck?”
“Look, the house was supposed to be empty,” protested Gun. “I follow the mom on Instagram. The whole family’s in Hawaii right now!”
“Well, obviously not the whole family,” said Flashlight through gritted teeth.
“I don’t know! I guess they Home Alone’d this bitch,” said Gun. “I can’t account for every contingency!”
Flashlight rubbed his forehead. “I knew this job was fucked,” he said almost to himself. “I knew I should’ve stayed home and—”
“We’ve got to kill her!” Heidi winced.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” said Flashlight. “Turn a burglary charge into first-degree murder? I know you’re new at this, man, but it’s not a fucking video game.”
Gun was panicking. “She saw our faces! We have no choice!” “It’s dark. She won’t remember us,” said Flashlight. “We cut our losses and leave.”
Gun went quiet. He almost seemed persuaded. Then, despite commanding Heidi not to scream, he bellowed at the top of his lungs: “Where’s the fucking silver!” as he pointed his gun at Heidi’s face again.
Heidi closed her eyes tight. “Downstairs in the safe.”
She led them down to the living room. Behind the fake Chagall that hung over the mantel (the real one was in secure storage in Utah) was a wall safe. Heidi punched in the digital code—the date her mother passed the bar—and the safe door swung open. “See?” said Flashlight. “All’s well that ends well.” It sounded like he was trying to reassure his jittery partner as much as Heidi.
Just then, there was a crash from the back of the house. “Fuck!” cried Gun. “It’s the cops!”
He grabbed Heidi and pressed his revolver to her temple.
Then he roughly frog-marched her into the kitchen. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “I have a hosta—”
The thing that was now standing in the opening of the back door wasn’t a cop.
It looked wrong. Its shape, its proportions, even its movements didn’t match what the brain expected to see. And no matter how much footage you’d seen on TV, that never changed. It was ropy and fleshy, covered in patchy tufts of coarse fur (or hair). Its eyes gleamed in the darkness, but they weren’t the eyes of an animal. The lips were pulled back to reveal a mouth full of sharklike teeth, a snarl that was also a smile. It was an amalgam that shouldn’t exist. And yet the fundamental awkwardness of its form belied an ungodly speed—the speed that all killers possess. In half a second the creature had closed the distance from the back door to the kitchen. As it charged, the burglar barely had time to point his gun away from Heidi and toward the beast.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
As he unloaded all six shots of his .38 special into the thing, Heidi wriggled out of his grasp.
Whether any of the six bullets hit, the creature was unfazed. With a huge swipe of its claws, it ripped open the burglar’s stomach and the soft, wet mass of his intestines spilled out onto the kitchen floor. He was dead before he hit the tiles.
Heidi ran for her life. But the werewolf had turned its attention to the other thief. It pounced on him.
Behind her, Heidi heard the sounds of a savage mauling as she raced through her darkened house. In the dining room, her foot caught on a corner of the rug and she fell hard onto the floor.
An instant later, she felt the weight of the beast land on her back, smashing the air out of her lungs and cracking her ribs.
The werewolf violently flipped her over. She smelled the stench of its breath, now tinged with the sharp iron of blood. It was going to tear her throat out.
“Fuck you!” bellowed Flashlight as he came barreling out of the kitchen and shoulder-checked the werewolf, shifting its weight off Heidi.
But the beast was far stronger. With a snarl it spun and flung him across the room. He landed in a heap on the other side of the dining room table.
This bought Heidi a second to act. She squirmed away and made for the living room. She groped into the safe and came out with a fork—part of a forty-six-piece set of Grande Baroque flatware that had been a wedding gift to her great-grandmother. The family silver.
She could feel the werewolf bearing down on her. Heidi screamed and spun, stabbing wildly with the fork. By luck or by miracle, she stabbed it into the soft flesh of the thing’s neck.
The beast let out a squeal of pure agony. In an instant, it had fled out the open back door and into the darkness beyond.
