All The Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper

All the Hearts You Eat is a horror novel about life and death and the bonds that tie people together, as dead trans girl Cabrina appears to loner Ivory and to her best friends in life Xi and Rex. Cabrina Brite washes up dead in Cape Morning, and Ivory finds her death poem lying nearby. Ivory didn’t know the girl, but she seems to be haunted by her now. Meanwhile Cabrina’s best friends are also dealing with the realisation that Cabrina’s presence is still around, in this small town that held no space for her.

I didn’t know anything about this book going in, so it was a very welcome surprise to discover that it is, if you really want to boil it down, a trans vampire book. All of the main characters are trans and the book explores who you can choose to be and who you can’t, using the gothic horror of a town haunted by vampiric creatures and a mysterious island. One of the great things about this book is the complexity and messiness of the main characters, especially the complex relationships between the three teenage characters who are just reaching adulthood. The ending really highlights how this isn’t a simple ‘trans characters versus the world’ book, but a horror novel with the space to explore different ideas about who someone is and how they might act when treated badly.

I found the book took me a while to get into, with the writing style quite obtuse at first so I couldn’t quite work out what was going on. Once I settled into the book it became much more enjoyable, though still occasionally a bit confusing. As everything else about this book was so up my street, it was a shame that I found it so hard to get into at first. However, this didn’t stop me really appreciating this book, from its depiction of the messiness of feelings between trans teenagers to its exploration of what it means to feel like a outsider and how that might cause you to react to promises from supernatural creatures. Piper uses horror to tackle a lot of interesting things about growing up trans in a small town, but doesn’t forget to include gory and dramatic moments along the way.