To All the Guys I Killed Before content warnings

To All the Guys I Killed Before is a love story with a body count. Please read on for content and trigger warnings.

If you prefer a bulleted list, click here.

In the spirit of full disclosure and the dark rom-com tradition of warning you before the corpses start corpsing: this is a love story with a body count.

I didn’t include what follows cavalierly. In this, the year of our WTAF, the men responsible for the real-world behavior fictionalized in this book too often walk away unscathed, so I wrote a story where they don’t. It’s a big ol’ overdue cathartic scream, and I feel great. The pain in here is real, but it moves toward vengeance, accountability, and healing.

Some of what follows will give away more than a blurb would. If you’d rather go in cold, skip ahead to the duplex. And if any of it hits close to home, please read with care.

Two threads run through this book. One is a hero whose surveillance-and-stalking habits are played for devotion and dark comedy. Our hero doesn’t get a pass and in fact is called on it, at length, by people who love him before he earns his way back. The other is the manosphere, men’s rights, and misogynist ideology and language, which live exclusively in the mouths of the villains. They also don’t get a pass, and their reckoning is a good deal more violent.

On the page: murder, torture, strangulation, gun violence, fatal arsons, blood and gore, sexual assault, sexual humiliation, women recorded without consent and shared online, nonsurgical amputations, restraint, drugging and injections, a coerced and eventually staged suicide, and a child who discovers the body of a neighbor. Our heroine works death-scene investigations, so there’s clinical handling of bodies. She also carries burn scars and skin grafts that come up on the page.

Discussed but not shown: rape, intimate partner violence and murder, child sexual abuse, parental death, and a childhood of neglect, emotional abuse, violence, foster care, and sibling separation.

The sex is explicit and runs to mask play, knife play, and the rough end of the spectrum, all of it enthusiastically consensual. One early scene has the hero grab and restrain the heroine before either of them knows the other’s intentions. (The situation resolves to everyone’s satisfaction.) There’s also some cheerful self-pleasure, with and without an audience on the other side of a very thin duplex wall. The audience is uninvited at first and very much invited later.

Finally, two reassurances. First, there’s a dog and a cat. The cat is oblivious and safe the whole time. The dog is roughly handled and is present for violence, but he ends this book safe, adored, and entirely unbothered by the Tarantino-grade carnage he’s witnessed. I would never harm them or, by extension, you. Second, and I cannot stress this enough, there is foot stuff. None in a sexual way, some in a murdery way, and one that’s purely the discussion of a living man’s feet, safely attached to his living body, doing nothing more sinister than existing. At least three people in my life will have a more outsized reaction to all of this than any of the preceding carnage, and I want them braced.

Welcome to the duplex, my lovelies. Be sure to stop and smell the roses.

Preorder To All the Guys I Killed Before