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Kailee Pedersen’s Sacrificial Animals Is One of the Year’s Best Horror Debuts

By Matthew Jackson  |  August 20, 2024 | 10:30am
Books Reviews Kailee Pedersen
Kailee Pedersen’s Sacrificial Animals Is One of the Year’s Best Horror Debuts
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As critics and reviewers, we throw often the word “promising” around quite a lot when talking about debut works. It’s a good word, one that implies talent in a newcomer yet leaves the door open for them to get better, to perhaps keep building toward a more fully formed version of who they are as a creator. Then there are those special debuts that crackle with such energy, such craft, such explosive power that “promising” doesn’t really cover it. Yes, there’s talent in the newcomer, but there’s also a power that suggests we’re already encountering a fully formed artist at work, emerging not just as a new arrival but as a formidable, mature talent. 

Sacrificial Animals is one of those debuts, and Kailee Pedersen is one of those artists. Tense, lush, and laced with beautifully engineered dread, this 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.

Set in rural Nebraska and inspired by Pedersen’s own childhood as an adoptee from China who grew up on a farm, Sacrificial Animals takes us to Stag’s Crossing, the homeland of the Morrow family that’s presided over by the iron fist of its patriarch, Carlyle. In the present day, Carlyle is dying, and his exiled sons Nick and Joshua have been invited home to say goodbye and, hopefully, make peace. For Nick, the younger and less favored of the two sons, it’s an invitation laced with tension, dredging up memories not just of the last time the family all saw each other at his wedding to enigmatic wife, Emilia, but of his childhood at Stag’s Crossing, and life in the shadow of his father’s violent edicts. 

Told across dual timelines, the story traces Nick’s development as a troubled adolescent tasked with rooting out a fox from the family hen house, then jumps forward to show us the wounded adult man Nick became: fearful of his father, resentful of Joshua, and beguiled by Emilia. What begins as a tense family reunion is soon consumed by these emotions, as Nick discovers Stag’s Crossing is just as foreboding as it always was, and tries to uncover Emilia’s long-held secrets.

Right away, Pedersen joins the ranks of horror’s great prose stylists, alongside writers like Sarah Gailey, Catriona Ward, and Cassandra Khaw. Her sentences are delivered with precision and with a singular cadence that blends fragmentary observations that stand out like landscape paintings with machine-gun bursts of insight and fury which lay bare the emotional rawness of the Morrow family. Sacrificial Animals is not a long novel, but the sheer force of insight that is conveyed through Pedersen’s elegant, restrained prose is enough to fill a whole trilogy with character beats and pure hypnotic doom. 

The book’s vivid, muscular style is then put to spellbinding use with the narrative itself, a slow-burn blend of family drama and folk horror that refuses to dole out its secrets until it’s good and ready. There’s a remarkable restraint in Pedersen’s story structure, yet the book never feels like it’s spinning its wheels, stuck in place for the sake of a third-act climax that’s not scheduled to arrive just yet. The reveals in Sacrificial Animals arrive like bones slowly emerging from snow drifts in a slow spring thaw, giving you a piece here, a piece there in a way that feels completely, hauntingly natural. It’s a masterclass in measured horror storytelling, and the book’s successes don’t end there.

Through the eyes of Nick Morrow, Sacrificial Animals becomes a strange beast of a horror novel, one that’s as much about the very real wounds inherent in this family’s would-be farming dynasty as it is about the unspeakable horrors that might be lurking in the woods. Pedersen is able to make both equally compelling, to conjure terror out of a cold, brutal father even when no punches or thrown, while creating a spellbinding mythology that feels as much like a dark fairy tale as it does like an exercise in pure, delirious fear. All of this makes Sacrificial Animals an astonishing feat, a horror debut that announces Pedersen as a major new talent in the genre and in fiction at large. We can’t wait to see what she does next.

Sacrificial Animals is available now wherever books are sold.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.

 
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