One of Crime Reads‘ Best Debut Crime Novels of the Month
One of Crime Reads‘ Best International Fiction of The Month
One of Debutiful‘s Must-Read Horror Debut Novels of 2026
“The stark combination of the dramatic banalities of motherhood and the classic realm of body horror mix into a bubbling, quietly suspenseful stew . . . De Fez’s novel is both campy horror novel and deep investigation of the perils of motherhood and the ease of slipping into a body that is unfamiliar and a mind that is suddenly out of your control. Horror continues to be a genre that helps us unlock deeper, frightening truths within ourselves, and fans in particular of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream will enjoy de Fez’s delicate blending of slow, frustrated dialogue between characters unwilling to open up, and the bloody honesty that follows.” —Chicago Review of Books
“There is a frenetic, dreamlike quality to much of the novel. This seems fitting, echoing a feeling modern readers and particularly parents know well—one might call this the quasi-psychosis of the busy—but it also feels perhaps too disorienting, a hyperbolic representation of life’s challenges and discontents. . . . Like Nightbitch and Fever Dream, recent surreal takes on motherhood, Don’t Leave Her Alone grips us because it makes the anxiety and pressure of being a mother both bizarrely grotesque and remarkably true to life.” —Newcity Lit
“Emmeshed parenting gets a cosmic horror twist in this psychological study of mothers, daughters, and the tentacles that bind. A grandmother, her daughters, and their daughters, find their codependency becoming literal after a strange encounter at a shopping mall. In an interview with Lizzie Davis, de Fez described the book as a cross between her mother and David Cronenberg, which is epic.” —Crime Reads
“In Don’t Leave Her Alone de Fez trains that eye on the complexity of motherhood—it’s impact on our autonomy as women, and the way it impacts our station in the world.” —Forbes
“Spanish author Desirée de Fez weaves three strands of narrative between a mother and her two daughters, each carrying a number of personal issues and secrets that will lead to unnerving and gory events on Christmas Eve . . . While eventually things explode into grotesque violence, this intimate, uncomfortable look into the daily lives of the three women plays out like a suburban realist nightmare, where the nastiest thing you’ll witness is the quiet violence of interpersonal interactions and the mundane horrors of their lives before things go to Hell.” —Reactor
“Three women in Barcelona grapple with notions of identity and the sacrifices of motherhood in the days leading up to Christmas…[readers] will appreciate this slowly building tale of complex mother-daughter relationships that are further complicated by loss of self, consumerism, and unspoken expectations. Fans of novels that blur the line between horror and magical realism such as Carlos Fuentes’ 1962 classic Aura, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova, or Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night will enjoy.” —Booklist
“Bloody body horror and twisted, complex mother-daughter relationships characterize this claustrophobic gut-punch of a debut novel. . . . The bizarre body horror elements are made all the more disturbing by how determinedly the women attempt to downplay what is happening to them. De Fez’s surreal examination of the crises of womanhood, and especially of the way women’s concerns are dismissed, feels sharp…her cinematic prose creates visceral imagery. This stings.” —Publishers Weekly
“A darkly enchanted expedition into the eviscerating oblivion of motherhood. de Fez writes with her sharpest knife.” —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“Being mothers and being daughters can feel like body horror, and that is what Desiree de Fez’s brilliant debut novel does: it turns bonds of intense love into torn bodies, glitter, and anxiety. Don’t Leave Her Alone is full of tenderness and delirium, moving between suburban realism and fairy tale.” —Mariana Enriquez, International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
“Compelling to the point of hypnotic, a tender and visceral study of mothers, daughters and sisters that recalls the best of King, Enriquez and Almodóvar, but which is ultimately uniquely its own. A gem.” —Virginia Feito, author of Victorian Psycho
“Don’t Leave Her Alone is an eldritch Pedro Almodovar nightmare, charting those liminal terrors found beyond the boundaries of the human body, where flesh itself is not safe.” —Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside and Ghost Eaters
“To be a mother is to know the world Desirée de Fez has imagined—visceral and nightmare-fueled yet sparkling with the fantastical. Don’t Leave Her Alone is a masterclass in body horror, explored through the lens of family, legacy and motherhood. This one reads like a hypnotic fever dream! Prepare to be spellbound from the first page.” —Karma Brown, #1 international bestseller of Recipe for a Perfect Wife and Mother is Watching
“An eerily relatable and outright eerie spin on dysfunctional families, the quiet horror of being alone, and the inescapable nature of blood ties. In Lizzie Davis’s keen and clear-eyed translation, Desirée de Fez’s prose pulses with dread, dark humor, and a relentless sense of unease.” —Paige Morris, New York Times bestselling translator of Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part
“Don’t Leave Her Alone captures that special kind of neuroticism intrinsic to each family. The obligation of mothers to their daughters, of sisters to each other, erupts with enough blood and viscera to make Clive Barker proud. Desirée de Fez delivers a Christmas miracle in the darkest way possible.” —Gus Moreno, author of This Thing Between Us
“Desirée de Fez descends into the dark core of family and memory to examine the fears that shape our identity. With brave, lucid writing—born of a compulsive need to transform anguish into understanding—she reveals horror, far from being purely destructive, as an extreme and radiant form of love for others and for ourselves. Not only is it an extraordinary novel; I can’t remember having read anything quite like it.” —J.A. Bayona, award-winning film director of The Society of the Snow and A Monster Calls
