Named a "Best Horror Book of 2024" by The New York Times, Vulture, Esquire, Paste Magazine, and Barnes & Noble
CrimeReads, Best Gothic Fiction of 2024
New York Public Library, Best Books for Adults 2024
Finalist for the Libby Book Awards, Best Horror
Otherwise Award 2024 Long List
Nebraska Book Award, Fiction Honor recipient

"An unremittingly gloomy and oppressive story that will haunt you for days... Pedersen is a great writer with a strong voice and an obvious love of language... [Sacrificial Animals] establishes Pedersen as a future master of speculative fiction." -The New York Times

"This novel presents a contemplatively paced supernatural horror tale, centering family, trauma, and revenge, with unease infused into every detail...the tightly coiled tension will eventually explode; when it does, [readers] will be left gasping in awe. Pedersen's debut skillfully balances character and atmosphere." -Library Journal, starred review

"This incantatory debut builds menace from its opening phrase. The author is merciless. She writes with a rare acuity...few readers are likely to quit before the final chapter...An assured and bloody fable heralds the arrival of a gifted new voice." -Kirkus Reviews

"The mythic Chinese figure of the nine-tailed fox spirit goes Midwestern Gothic in Pedersen's unsettling debut. Literary horror that isn't afraid to show its teeth. Pedersen is sure to win fans." -Publishers Weekly

"A slow burning horror story...Pedersen provides a brilliant and unforgiving commentary on toxic masculinity and racism." -Booklist

"A genre mashup of Chinese mythology, supernatural horror, thriller, and Midwestern family drama, Sacrificial Animals is a breathtaking upending of the American family saga." -Shelf Awareness

" Savage in its details and saturated with dread." -Esquire, The Best Horror Books of 2024

"A remarkable debut, a striking blend of American frontier stoicism and Chinese folklore." -Vulture, Best Horror Books of 2024

"Dark and bone-chillingly bloody... Sacrificial Animals is remarkable in its keen barbarism, the author's blending of the ordinary violence of rural life with the gravity of a Chinese myth... The novel's final pages are a wild frenzy of beauty, vengeance and viscera." -LA Times

"Tense, lush, and laced with beautifully engineered dread, [Sacrificial Animals] is a special book, one that horror fans everywhere should pick up as soon as possible, because you don't want to miss a moment of what this author has got to show you." -Paste Magazine

"Kailee Pedersen explodes onto the scene with Sacrificial Animals! A weird, gorgeously written supernatural thriller about how the crimes of our fathers can cast dark and devastating shadows over innocent lives. Very highly recommended!" -Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of Cave 13 and The Dragon in Winter

"Sacrificial Animals is distinctly observant, and distinctly unsettling. It begins with one sort of menace and ends with another entirely, so that while the book barely leaves its little patch of acres, and the souls who occupy it hardly move an inch from the traumas that shaped them long ago, it leaves you with a feeling of immense distances traveled." -Kevin Brockmeier, New York Times Bestselling author

"An incandescent study of American masculinity with an unforgettable genre-busting twist." - Alex Landragin, author of Crossings

"Brutal and mesmerizing, Kailee Pedersen's Sacrificial Animals drew me in immediately. Easily readable in one sitting, this enigmatic family saga is better savored to appreciate the rhythm of the language and the growing sense of unease. Highly recommended." - Kendare Blake, #1 NYT bestselling author of Three Dark Crowns

"A delicately braided and unflinching tale of inherited family damage and revenge that walks a careful line between the realistic and the supernatural, crossing from one into the other before you--or the hapless characters--are fully aware. Sacrificial Animals reads like what might happen if Cormac McCarthy and Lafcadio Hearn were stuck waiting out a snowstorm in Nebraska and decided to collaborate." - Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

"Kailee Pedersen employs the rich prose of early Cormac McCarthy, the bracingly vivid descriptive power of Willa Cather, and the doom-heavy fatefulness of Greek tragedy to create something very much her own: a deliciously gothic horror novel. The set-up is simple: an abusive father summons his two grown sons home for a deathbed reconciliation. But before they can bury the old man, the ghost of a crime from their collective past comes calling, seeking vengeance. Sacrificial Animals' final thirty pages will leave you gasping." - Scott Smith, New York Times Bestselling author of The Ruins

"Kailee Pedersen's terse, tense, deeply unnerving debut novel mesmerized me from beginning to end. This is a young writer to watch!" -Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk