A darkly funny, sexy, and twisty magical debut romance from Kate Fox, perfect for fans of Ali Hazelwood’s Bride or Ashley Poston’s Dead Romantics.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Succubus: A Love Story by Kate Fox, which is out now.
Her touch kills, his saves the dying. Are they fated, or forbidden?
Tempest Dunlap loves romance novels, but she knows she’ll never have her own happily-ever-after. She is a sweatpants-wearing doula who homeschools her seven-year-old niece in suburban New Jersey. Unfortunately, she’s also a succubus: Every man she’s ever kissed has died. But Tempest is a good person who never intended to be a murderer, so she’s sworn off love forever.
Then she meets Joel Tav, a gorgeous, gentle doctor who makes celibacy feel impossible. Tempest knows she can’t touch him—or tell him his brother was the last man she dated and accidentally killed.
Meanwhile, a vigilante is hunting people with dark powers, and Tempest is next. Should she keep hiding in her safe, lonely life, or should she embrace the darkness she fears and risk the ultimate forbidden romance?
Maybe Tempest will get her love story after all . . . or maybe she’ll become its villain.
EXCERPT
CHAPTER 1
Benjamin Fickler was the first boy I ever killed.
No one called him Benjamin. I’m being formal, out of respect. It was Benny. We were fourteen and I kissed him first. He wasn’t sure he was ready. I could tell. I liked that about him.
My two best friends at the time—their names don’t matter—preferred boys who were the tallest, the loudest, the usual. Benny was on the short side, often smiling like he was open to the possibility that everything might turn out to be a joke.
It was early summer. I asked him to go for a walk with me. My plan was that we would kiss on the blue bridge over the lightly polluted stream in the preserve two blocks down from my house. When we got to the bridge, I stopped, and he had to stop, too, and then I said something subtle like, “Do you want to kiss me?” and he looked slightly terrified, which was more appropriate than I realized at the time.
“I guess,” he said, looking down. “Sure.”
I remember the toothpaste-white of his sneakers. He wasn’t wearing a cool first-kiss outfit, but I didn’t mind.
“Do you want to go first?” I said chivalrously. When he didn’t move, I leaned forward, too nervous to wait, and pressed my tight, uncertain lips to his soft, looser ones. It was shocking to be against his skin, his nose. His breath was on my mouth, the smell of his mom’s favorite laundry detergent rising from his shirt, a pink, overextended scent.
Why am I reliving this?
Because it’s the least I can do.
I’m not in therapy. I tried that at nineteen, when my suspicions were horrifyingly confirmed. I spoke in code of course, because the truth wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of believable. Thank God I have Grub now. And Dee, even though she doesn’t believe me, either.
It wasn’t the kiss on the bridge that killed Benny. That was just the first drop of poison. The next time, we kept going, pecking wetly, perched like virgin birds on his musty basement couch. Then Benny got sick—his dad couldn’t wake him up one morning. That’s what I heard. They rushed him to the hospital, but it was as though his lungs had simply given up. They said it was maybe a virus. We did a memorial service: the whole school, candles lit, kids crying with our arms around each other; we couldn’t believe Benny was gone. No one had known until then that death—as distant as war, as outer space—could swoop down at any random moment and grab someone our age and carry them off, never to be seen again.
I had no idea that it was my fault. It’s funny—I was worried that maybe I’d gotten the virus from him. Maybe my lungs would quit, too.
Not funny, obviously. Nothing about it is funny. I didn’t know until college. Until Sam.
By then, I’d also killed a boy named Arlo Wu, who was the captain of the debate team junior year of high school. He was long-haired, sarcastic, and sensitive. A little goofy, like Benny. We got mozzarella sticks at the diner. I invited him over when my mom was at work late, and Dee, my little sister, was at twirling practice. We made out on my bed and put our hands down each other’s pants, and that was the first time I touched a penis.
His heart gave out two days later. A Thursday. Maybe he’d had an undiagnosed heart defect, they said. I went to his funeral, and I’ll never forget his little sister’s face as she watched her parents holding each other and crying in heaving gasps as though Arlo had taken the air with him into that casket.
My hair, always frustratingly thin and limp, seemed thicker in the weeks afterward. It was easier to wake up in the morning, even if I hadn’t gotten much sleep. I felt lit up, buoyant through my sadness. As though every microscopic thing inside me was suddenly going right, even as everything outside me went wrong. You could say I was full of life. As though I’d eaten an extra helping of it.
I am so unlucky, I wrote in my diary.
“You are so unlucky,” Carly (okay, that was the name of one of the best friends) told me. “It’s like every boy you like dies.”
“Don’t say that!” I yelped.
But I didn’t date anyone else in high school. I felt like maybe I’d been in love with Arlo. I learned guitar and wrote some songs about him. Then I went to college, became more of a hippie, and killed Sam (the first boy I had sex with), and I began to wonder.
When I turned nineteen and killed Omar, I knew.
From the book SUCCUBUS by Kate Fox. Copyright (C) 2026 by Kate Fox. Reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
