The Only Child

“Gothic fans rejoice!” (The Globe and Mail)

The #1 internationally bestselling author of The Demonologist radically reimagines some of literature’s classic masterpieces—Frankenstein, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula—in a contemporary novel driven by relentless suspense and breathtaking emotion.

This is the story of a man who may be the world’s one real-life monster, and the only woman who has a chance of finding him.

As a forensic psychiatrist at New York’s leading institution of its kind, Dr. Lily Dominick has evaluated the mental states of some of the country’s most dangerous psychotics. But the strangely compelling client she interviewed today—a man with no name, accused of the most twisted crime—struck her as somehow different from the others, despite the two impossible claims he made.

First, that he is more than two hundred years old, and he personally inspired Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker to create the three novels of the nineteenth century that define the monstrous in the modern imagination. Second, that he’s Lily’s father. To discover the truth—behind her client, her mother’s death, herself—Dr. Dominick must embark on a journey that will threaten her career, her sanity, and ultimately her life.

A “breathtaking story rife with emotion and chilling suspense” (The Big Thrill Magazine), The Only Child fuses the page-turning tension of a first-rate thriller with a provocative take on where thrillers come from. In his latest novel, “Andrew Pyper’s writing is gripping, and readers will undoubtedly make comparisons to Stephen King” (Library Journal) as they stay up all night to discover the last, unforgettable revelation.

Andrew Pyper (1968–2025) was the internationally bestselling author of fourteen novels, including The Homecoming, The Only Child, The Damned, and The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers award for Best Hardcover Novel, as well as The Killing Circle, which was selected a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year. He lived in Toronto with his family.