Goodnight Monsters by Suzanne Junered is a wild, unsettling ride through pregnancy, motherhood, and murder

Suzanne Junered’s Goodnight Monsters, releasing September 1, 2026, is a psychological horror novel about pregnancy, motherhood, murder, and the terrifying space where fantasy begins to blur with reality—and this book was such a wild ride, I am 100% here for it.

Lia has spent two years as a stay-at-home wife trying to get pregnant, following the same suburban script as the other women in her neighborhood. She and her husband, Evan, have dreamed of becoming parents, and Lia has devoted herself to making that dream happen. But when she finally gets the positive pregnancy test she has been waiting for, instead of feeling uncomplicated joy, she finds herself questioning whether she actually wants to become a mother. And honestly, I was immediately intrigued by that premise.

Lia has spent so much time trying to become the woman she thinks she is supposed to be that she has almost disappeared beneath the role. So when she decides she needs another purpose beyond waiting for her husband to come home and trying to get pregnant, she takes a job at a forensic anthropology center known affectionately as The Body Farm. The center is run by her former college advisor, with whom Lia also had an affair when she was a 17-year-old undergraduate, because apparently Lia’s life wasn’t complicated enough already.

Then she finds out she is pregnant. The timing is almost comically terrible, except that there is nothing particularly funny about the questions Lia suddenly has to confront. She decides to give herself a deadline: she will make her decision about the pregnancy before she reaches the point in her gestation when abortion is no longer an option. Until then, she keeps the pregnancy secret from everyone.

Meanwhile, she becomes increasingly fascinated by death. This was easily my favorite element of the novel. I was completely hooked by the Body Farm setting. I have actually considered donating my own body to a body farm for forensic research someday, so getting an inside look at the operations of such a facility was fascinating to me. There is something strangely comforting about the idea of returning my body to the Earth rather than being either reduced to ashes or pumped full of chemicals only to be sealed in a coffin inside a concrete vault. If my remains can help forensic investigators understand decomposition and solve murders, and then I can eventually become part of a meadow, that seems like a pretty good use of a body that I no longer need. Of course, Goodnight Monsters did make me wonder whether I would actually get a say in how my body was laid out.

Junered makes the Body Farm more than an interesting setting, though. As Lia spends more time around the dead, her fascination with death becomes increasingly personal. She begins fantasizing about killing people, and these aren’t vague little intrusive thoughts. Her imagined murders are gruesome, elaborate, and disturbingly vivid. Sometimes they feel so real that even Lia isn’t entirely sure where fantasy ends and reality begins. And then she starts sleeping with Robbie, one of her coworkers.

Robbie is the person who seems to see Lia most clearly, including the parts of herself she is desperately trying to hide. With Evan frequently traveling for work, their affair is relatively easy to fall into, and Robbie becomes the one person Lia believes she can be completely honest with. He doesn’t seem frightened by the darker parts of her personality. Instead, he accepts her in a way that feels increasingly important as Lia becomes more isolated from everyone else. But then the fantasies start getting harder to dismiss.

One morning, a young woman’s body arrives at the Body Farm as a donation. The problem is that Lia had fantasized about killing her the night before. The young woman has apparently died by suicide, but the timing is almost impossible to ignore. Did Lia somehow predict her death? Did she unconsciously know something she shouldn’t have known? Or is something much more sinister happening?

From there, Goodnight Monsters really begins to unravel. As more people around Lia die and her ability to distinguish her fantasies from reality deteriorates, the novel becomes an increasingly claustrophobic exploration of what she is capable of—and what she is capable of imagining herself capable of.

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What I particularly appreciated, though, was that beneath all the murder and psychological horror, Goodnight Monsters is asking some genuinely uncomfortable questions about motherhood. Lia’s anxiety isn’t simply about whether she wants a baby. It’s about what happens to her identity if she becomes a mother. She has already spent two years structuring her life around the expectation of pregnancy, and now that pregnancy has actually happened, she has to confront the possibility that she may not want the life she worked so hard to create.

Women are so often expected to view motherhood as the ultimate fulfillment. We’re told that wanting a child is instinctive, that pregnancy should be joyful, and that becoming a mother is something that completes us. But what happens when you don’t feel completed? What happens when you realize that the identity you’ve been working toward doesn’t actually feel like yours? Goodnight Monsters takes those questions and pushes them into increasingly disturbing territory.

Lia is not an easy character to love, and I don’t think she is supposed to be. She is selfish, secretive, impulsive, and frequently makes decisions that seem destined to make her situation exponentially worse. But that made her fascinating to follow. Her desire to escape the expectations placed on her is understandable even when her methods become increasingly horrifying.

And that is where the horror of the novel really works for me. The monsters aren’t simply the dead bodies at the Body Farm or the increasingly gruesome murder fantasies running through Lia’s mind. Some of the monsters are the expectations women are asked to carry—the expectation to want motherhood, to sacrifice everything for it, to be grateful for it, and to accept that their own identities must inevitably become secondary once they have children. Goodnight Monsters takes those expectations and asks what might happen if they became unbearable.

The result is strange, disturbing, occasionally shocking, and completely engrossing (and sometimes just gross!) Junered throws Lia into one increasingly bizarre situation after another until you aren’t sure whether you’re watching a woman lose her grip on reality, uncovering something genuinely sinister, or witnessing the consequences of a mind that has spent too long imagining the worst.

If you enjoy psychological horror that isn’t afraid to get messy, Goodnight Monsters is definitely one to put on your September reading list. It’s a dark exploration of pregnancy and motherhood wrapped around a wonderfully creepy Body Farm setting, with enough twists and escalating insanity to keep the pages turning. And if you’ve ever thought about donating your body to science, well…you might want to read this one before you fill out the paperwork.

What do you think: would you ever consider donating your body to a Body Farm for forensic research, or does Goodnight Monsters make that idea a little too terrifying? Tell me what you think in the comments below.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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