Secret Santa

The Office meets Stephen King, dressed up in holiday tinsel, in this fun, festive, and frightening horror-comedy set during the horror publishing boom of the ’80s, by New York Times best-selling satirist Andrew Shaffer.

Out of work for months, Lussi Meyer is desperate to work anywhere in publishing. Prestigious Blackwood-Patterson isn’t the perfect fit, but a bizarre set of circumstances leads to her hire and a firm mandate: Lussi must find the next horror superstar to compete with Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub. It’s the ’80s, after all, and horror is the hottest genre.

But as soon as she arrives, Lussi finds herself the target of her co-workers' mean-spirited pranks. The hazing reaches its peak during the company’s annual Secret Santa gift exchange, when Lussi receives a demonic-looking object that she recognizes but doesn't understand. Suddenly, her coworkers begin falling victim to a series of horrific accidents akin to a George Romero movie, and Lussi suspects that her gift is involved.

With the help of her former author, the flamboyant Fabien Nightingale, Lussi must track down her anonymous Secret Santa and figure out the true meaning of the cursed object in her possession before it destroys the company—and her soul.

Part horror and part sharp satire, this novel is deeply weird and darkly funny in a way that only New York Times best-selling author Andrew Shaffer can create.

Andrew Shaffer is the New York Times best-selling author of Quirk’s Obama/Biden Mystery series, the satirical thriller The Day of the Donald: Trump Trumps America, and the Goodreads Choice semifinalist Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody, among other humorous fiction and nonfiction books for HarperCollins and Penguin Random House. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, the author Tiffany Reisz.