Nostalgic Reads for an Angry Heart: Dev Lemons Horror Readalikes

I have a new musical obsession. An earworm that crawled in and won’t come out. Its name is Dev Lemons. The best way I can describe Dev Lemons’ music is by saying she’s the love child of Fefe Dobson and Mindless Self Indulgence. Her music is the musical version of early 2000s fashion coming back to bite us in our low-rise jeans-clad ass. 

Except unlike seeing the bad fashions of the early aughts again, I’m not cringed out by Dev Lemons, who is able to make me feel like how I felt in 2002, specifically when I saw the music video for Avril Lavigne’s ‘Complicated’ on MTV for the first time. That feeling of my whole insides being ripped out and displayed in teenage angst and rage on the screen. Except it’s not 2002 and I’m not 12 anymore. 

It’s 2026—damn near 2027—and I’m 36. Still pretty angry about a lot of things in the world, though. Lucky for me, there’s artists out there still making music that speaks to the angry part of me that is still one of the youths. 

Dev Lemons gained a lot of popularity on TikTok for her short horror promo videos that brought nostalgia to a head with lots of 90s Window’s computer style graphics blended with glitched out images of herself as spiders and other animals as seen in the lyric video for ‘best friend.’ But the horror of Dev Lemons doesn’t stop there. Many of her music videos have an element of the uncanny and horrific blended with her pop music about love, rejection, and the complicated emotions of being a twenty-something woman. 

And since fall is the season of nostalgia for me, of Gilmore Girls, Practical Magic (1999), The Craft, Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and everything to smell sweet with decay and for things to burn bright and dull as they die, I want to recommend some books that have a sense of a particular Dev Lemons nostalgia. A nostalgia that’s angry, reckless, and very mischievous. So here are five books that feel like a Dev Lemons’ song: electric, sad, angsty, and nostalgic.

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Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

Lee Mandelo’s Southern Gothic debut novel from 2022, Summer Sons, released to acclaim and people feeling deeply connected to Mandelo’s characters in the gay horror romance about two friends whose commitment and love for one another goes beyond the grave. Mandelo’s novel hits the Dev Lemons nostalgia for me in the anger of the main character, Andrew, who swims through grief to find new love and new friends in a place steeped in ghosts. Mandelo’s writing of Andrew’s emotions is full out and engrossing, showing both the absurdity and obsession of young love. It’s so reminiscent of the feelings and atmosphere of ‘FACE’ for me, where Dev Lemons sings of going unnoticed by someone so wrapped up in their own pain that they hurt others around them.

Summer Sons

Lee Mandelo’s debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost.Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble.And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall.

Tor BooksLee Mandelo

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Released in 2013, Joe Hill’s new vampire (ie, not your dad’s vampire) horror N0S4A2 is about a string of people with powers wondrous and murderous, battling it out for hunger, revenge, and survival. Hill’s novel does not have the same gay pulsing heart running through it as Mandelo’s. It still, however, has the darkness plaguing a character who is angry, alone, and troubled. Vic McQueen, the main character of N0S4A2, is the type of grungy girl and woman I like hanging out with. The type of woman who, despite living in the modern world, reads as though she’s ripped from the past. The Dev Lemons song that comes to mind for this book is ‘NOTHING CHANGES’ for the relentless nature of the villain in Hill’s book and the propulsive emotional writing. Like with ‘FACE’ and many of the songs on the album “Surface Tension,” ‘NOTHING CHANGES’ is hard tunes and distorted vocalized rage.  

NOS4A2: A Novel

The spine-tingling, bone-chilling novel of supernatural horror from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman and Horns—now an AMC original series starring Zachary Quinto, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Ashleigh Cummings.“A masterwork of horror.”— TimeVictoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be.Charles Talent Manx has a gift of his own. He likes to take children for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the vanity plate NOS4A2. This haunted car is his gateway to evil. In the Wraith, he and his innocent guests can slip out of the everyday world and onto hidden roads that lead to an astonishing playground of amusements he calls Christmasland. The journey across the highway of Charlie’s twisted imagination transforms his precious passengers, leaving them as terrifying and unstoppable as their psychic vampire benefactor.Then comes the day when Vic goes looking for trouble...and finds her way to Charlie. That was a lifetime ago. Now, the only kid ever to escape Charlie’s evil is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx hasn’t stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. On the road again, he won’t slow down until he’s taken his revenge. He’s after something very special—something Vic can never replace, sparking a battle for the soul of her own child.As a life-and-death battle of wills builds, Vic McQueen prepares to destroy Charlie once and for all—or die trying.

William Morrow PaperbacksJoe Hill

Strange Lights by Mira González

This one is a recent release that I had the chance to read an advanced reader copy of over the summer. Mira González’s horror/sci-fi Strange Lights follows a paranormal investigator, Reggie, and the chupacabra toddler she guards and parents. Reggie is not only harboring the chupacabra from the government and other paranormal fans who would put her in danger, but is hiding a past just as dark and extraordinary as the alien invasion taking place throughout the novel. For Strange Lights, I get ‘Maybe I’m the Reason’ for the dark emotional writing and atmosphere of the book that aligns real well with Dev Lemons’ lyrics in the song. 

Strange Lights

Like Scooby Doo meets The X Files for readers of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Strange Lights is a joyride in a sentient Winnebago with a quirky cast of cryptids.“Exuberant and heartfelt.”--Publishers WeeklyParenting is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when your toddler is a chupacabra.Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi--a bloodsucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. Reggie wants nothing more than to put her complicated past in the rearview mirror and fade into as much obscurity as her toddler will allow. But a rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin, a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments.With Reggie’s history quickly catching up to her and Eldi in the agency’s crosshairs, any shred of normalcy evaporates. Reggie must decide: Can she confront her dark past to save Eldi--and an entire alien species--from getting wiped out of the universe?

Bindery BooksMira González

The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw

The 2024 novel The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw was billed as an “unhinged eldritch horror,” which is the perfect way to describe this book. I’ve also called it electric eldritch boogaloo for the novel’s grimy party atmosphere, blended with a magical fantasy world. The novel carries a weight of heartbreak mixed with anger that doesn’t feel sad so much as fed-up and ready to move on toward bigger and better things to break. Dev Lemons comes to her second album “hunting what we already killed” with the same type of “fuck your heartbreak” energy.  

The Dead Take the A Train

Bestselling authors Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey have teamed up to deliver a dark new story with magic, monsters, and mayhem, perfect for fans of unhinged eldritch horror.Julie is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-year-old whose only retirement plan is dying early. She’s been trying to establish herself in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs, exorcize the nastiest demons, and make deals with the cruelest gods to claw her way to the top. But nothing can prepare her for the toughest job yet: when her best friend, Sarah, shows up at her door in need of help. Keeping Sarah safe becomes top priority. Julie is desperate for a quick fix to break the dead-end grind and save her friend. But her power grab sets off a deadly chain of events that puts Sarah – and the entire world - directly in the path of annihilation. The first explosive adventure in the Carrion City Duology, The Dead Take the A Train fuses Cassandra Khaw’s cosmic horror and Richard Kadrey’s gritty fantasy into a full-throttle thrill ride straight into New York’s magical underbelly.A 2024 Dragon Awards for Best Horror Novel nominee!

Tor NightfireRichard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Y’all remember when this was the book everyone who was anyone was reading? Some did it to connect with their own feminine rage and others did it to try and understand the puzzling mystery of “why woman so mad?” Carmen Maria Machado wonderfully answers this question in eight darkly speculative stories in the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties that ranges in themes and voices but stays sweetly nestled behind a mature, broken heart. The stories in Her Body and Other Parties are still angry, but Machado is able to look hard at this pain and be a little comical about it like the best Dev Lemons songs. There’s also a punk fem rock feel to Machado’s stories that reflects the same vibe as many of Lemons’ songs like ‘best friend,’ where Lemons sings about the deeper loss of friendship in break ups. 

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction“[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay“In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen RussellIn Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Graywolf PressCarmen Maria Machado

For people in the same headspace as me and reaching for the nostalgia of artists like Dev Lemons, what books are scratching that itch for you?