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Goodnight Monsters by Suzanne Junered
Genre: Horror
Pages: 304
Rating: ★★★★☆
Buy: Bookshop.org (releases Sept 1, 2026)
This post contains spoilers.
Book Blurb
For fans of Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Ashley Audrain’s The Push, a psychological horror novel that follows a woman obsessed with death who must decide if she’s fit to bring new life into this world—especially after someone she’s fantasized about killing turns up dead.
Southern suburban housewife Lia and her husband Evan have long dreamed of becoming parents—but when a pregnancy test shows positive, Lia questions whether she wants the child and keeps her pregnancy a secret.
As she’s holding new life inside, she intentionally surrounds herself with death by blackmailing her way into a job at a forensic anthropology center endearingly called The Body Farm. At The Farm, monsters emerge from within Lia—the desire to kill—and she begins daydreaming about murder. Because fantasizing never hurt anyone. Or so she thinks.
Then a body donation to The Farm turns out to be someone she’s imagined killing, and reality and fantasy begin to blur. As people around her begin to die, Lia loses trust in her loved ones and herself . . . and ultimately must put her monsters to bed.
My Thoughts
Goodnight Monsters pulled me into its increasingly unsettling psychological spiral. From the beginning, I was fascinated (and a bit uncomfortable) with Lia’s thoughts and behavior. I didn’t like the affair she begins, especially how quickly she seems to sink into it, and I kept questioning what was happening to her as her thoughts became darker and more violent.
At first, I wasn’t sure whether the book wanted me to believe these thoughts were caused by the pregnancy or whether something else was going on. People can have intrusive thoughts without wanting to act on them. We’ve all had those bizarre, unwanted thoughts that pop into our heads and make us wonder, “Why did I just think that?”
Lia’s thoughts obviously go far beyond that, though, and working at a cadaver investigation facility certainly doesn’t seem like the healthiest environment for someone already obsessing over death. At the same time, the book makes it clear that her fascination with death predates her pregnancy, particularly because of the trauma surrounding her father’s early death. That made me wonder whether pregnancy was creating something entirely new or simply amplifying problems that were already there.
Then the book started messing with my head.
There were so many moments where I genuinely couldn’t tell what was happening. Was that a dream? Did she actually witness someone bleeding to death at the river? Did she really kill someone or was it a hallucination? The fact that Lia seemed to be experiencing these violent fantasies and hallucinations as though they were actually happening made the story incredibly disorienting in the best possible way.
The hospital scene in particular had me questioning everything. When Lia accidentally kills the older man and Robbie sees it, I was sitting there wondering how this guy suddenly appeared, why he was staying with her, and how he seemed so completely unfazed by what happened.
Then there were all these little details that made me question whether Robbie actually existed. How did he have access to her office, why hadn’t Lia mentioned him to certain people, and why did other characters seem to react strangely whenever he came up? The book kept planting these little seeds of doubt until I was questioning practically everything Lia was experiencing.
And then the Angela reveal really got me. Lia actually did kill her, but she’s convinced it was another daydream. That distinction between what Lia thinks happened and what actually happened was one of my favorite elements of the book because it made the horror feel more psychological than supernatural. It also made the consequences much more disturbing because Lia isn’t simply an unreliable narrator telling us a story; she genuinely doesn’t understand the reality of what she’s done.
I also really appreciated the way the book handled Lia’s feelings about the pregnancy. She can’t immediately decide whether she wants the baby, and she’s forced to keep those feelings largely to herself. That felt painfully believable. There can be an enormous amount of pressure on women to feel nothing but happiness about pregnancy, and the book does a good job exploring what happens when someone is experiencing much darker emotions that they don’t feel safe admitting.
The pregnancy and mental health elements ended up being what made the book work for me the most. I thought Goodnight Monsters had some interesting commentary on pregnancy psychosis, prenatal depression, and the mental health struggles that can accompany pregnancy. Lia seems to have already had some underlying issues before becoming pregnant, and the pregnancy appears to exacerbate everything exponentially.
I also liked that the story didn’t treat psychosis as a convenient excuse that erased everything she did. Lia faces consequences for her actions, and she is remorseful. Her mental state helps explain what happened, but it doesn’t simply make the actions disappear.
I found Goodnight Monsters was effective because the horror remains mostly rooted in reality. Even when Lia’s perceptions become completely distorted, the story is ultimately exploring something that could happen in the real world. Some of the events are certainly heightened for the sake of the story, but the emotional and psychological foundation felt believable.
And surprisingly, this book made me cry. I wasn’t expecting that at all. By the end, I actually felt sympathetic toward Lia despite everything she’d done, which is difficult to pull off when your protagonist has committed some genuinely horrifying acts.
I also thought the book was incredibly cinematic. I could easily picture so many of these scenes playing out on screen, particularly the moments where reality and Lia’s imagination blur together. The visual nature of the story would make for a seriously unsettling adaptation.
The ending also helped bring everything together. The explanations clarified the things I’d been questioning throughout the book, and I appreciated that Lia ultimately has to live with what happened. Even the final appearance of Robbie works once you understand it through the lens of her sleep deprivation and mental state. It left me feeling like she had ended up in the place where she needed to be, even if getting there came at an enormous cost.
Final Thoughts
Goodnight Monsters was a much more psychological and grounded horror story than I expected, and that’s ultimately why it worked so well for me. The book takes pregnancy, mental illness, intrusive thoughts, trauma, and the fear of losing control and turns them into something genuinely disturbing.
What I appreciated most was that it didn’t use Lia’s mental illness to completely absolve her of responsibility. She does terrible things, but the story also allows us to understand why she was capable of doing them. She faces consequences, feels remorse, and has to live with what happened. Her psychosis provides context rather than a free pass.
The book also highlights something that doesn’t get talked about enough: women can experience incredibly dark thoughts and emotions during pregnancy, and the expectation that pregnancy should automatically be a joyful experience can make it even harder to admit when something is wrong.
Lia’s struggle with whether she even wants the baby, her fear of telling people what she’s thinking, and the way her existing trauma and mental health struggles become magnified during pregnancy all give the horror a very real foundation.
There were definitely moments when I was confused about what was actually happening, and some of the plot developments required me to simply go along for the ride until the explanations came. But once everything came together, I appreciated how much the earlier confusion had been doing to put us inside Lia’s perspective.
If you’re looking for a psychological horror novel about pregnancy that stays grounded in reality, rather than relying entirely on supernatural explanations, Goodnight Monsters is worth checking out. It’s disturbing, cinematic, emotionally complicated, and surprisingly heartbreaking.
If you love psychological horror that gets inside a character’s head and makes you question what’s real, ‘Goodnight Monsters’ by Suzanne Junered deserves a spot on your TBR. Pick up a copy through Bookshop.org and support independent bookstores while you’re at it.
Check out other Horror Reviews:
The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer
Widow’s Point by Richard Chizmar & W.H. Chizmar
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
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