by Tanya Pell
First published 2026
Barbra Jacobs has spent twenty years trying to outrun the role that made her famous. At forty, she still gets recognized at horror conventions, still signs old photos of herself as the Final Girl from the Mirror franchise, and still fields the quiet condescension of an industry that refuses to see her as anything more than a scream queen. When a producer offers her the hosting chair on a buzzy new horror docuseries called The Monsters We Made, Barb takes it as her first real shot at reinvention. Then fans start dying. The kills mirror scenes from her own films, and the man behind them is dressed as Mirror Man, the villain she spent two decades pretending to outrun on screen. Barb is not a character in someone else's story this time. She is the target. The book tracks her fight to survive while asking a harder question underneath the blood and momentum: what does a woman owe to the version of herself the world decided she was? Funny, fast, and genuinely tense, this is a slasher built around a woman who refuses to be packaged twice.
Genres: mystery, horror, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: dark, darkly-comedic, fast-paced, suspenseful, tense
Tropes: final-girl, meta-narrative, self-discovery, target-of-obsession
Setting: Hollywood, horror conventions
352 pages · Hardcover · Gallery Books
Content warnings: gore, murder, violence