Review
BARNES & NOBLE BEST HORROR 2024
PASTE MAGAZINE BEST HORROR BOOKS 2024
ESQUIRE BEST HORROR BOOK OF 2024
LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST HORROR OF 2024
REACTOR BEST BOOKS OF 2024
THE LINEUP HORROR HIGHLIGHTS 2024
A stark rumination on purpose and struggle... If you're a reader looking for raw discussion from a resolute voice, Coup de Grâce may be your next stop—Fangoria
Equal parts fun and frantic desolation... Like all good liminal architecture, Coup de Grâce contains far more than its space should allow, and it unfolds like cursed origami.—Esquire
An incredibly immersive read, but sensitive, heartbreaking and hopeful too.—Reactor, Best Books of 2024
Ajram is a lyricist of the highest order... Definitely one of the best novellas of the year. Don’t miss it.—Gabino Iglesias, Locus Magazine
Full of evocative, carefully constructed prose and featuring some formalist flourishes that transform its final pages into even more of an emotional gut punch, Coup de Grâce is one of those books you can read in an afternoon, and then think about for months... an incredible debut from Ajram.—Paste Magazine, Best Horror Books 2024
Ajram cleverly transforms what seems like a deceptively simple plot into a complex, moving, and immersive contemplation of the very real horror of living with severe depression.—The Lineup, Horror Highlights 2024
"In this caustic confrontation with the self, Ajram's carefully crafted dread is a hand wrapped around your throat.”—Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold
“Sofia Ajram has crafted a dizzying and unsettling story, beautifully navigating the stormy waters that lie between blind hope and clear-eyed despair. Coup de Grâce is a gift to anyone who reads it, wrapped neatly in slate gray paper and topped with a Möbius strip bow.”—Scott Leeds, author of Schrader's Chord
"Intricately woven and often too upsetting to bear, Ajram's debut novella pulsates with a dizzying, almost mystifying energy. You will not feel safe while reading this book. A gift to be savored, a transgression to be endured."—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
"To succinctly describe the power of this haunting labyrinth of a book would require a writer of Sofia Ajram's skill--and that's a rare thing indeed. This is the sort of story you read in one day and then think about for a lifetime. It's bigger on the inside."—Nat Cassidy, author of Nestlings and Mary: An Awakening of Terror
“An ever-expanding labyrinthine nightmare. A maze of memory. A kaleidoscope of caverns and chambers, peering deep into our movements of wake and sleep, guilt and regret and purpose. Coup de Grâce is one of the most unique, yet terrifying stories I have ever read, a terror so infinite I feel completely changed having read it.” Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Crime Scene and Children of Chicago
"Coup de Grâce is dark, visceral, and refreshing. It's horror that feels modern and exciting, it pulls you down into the depths with the protagonist and holds you under until the last page. It's an insanely impressive debut, combining surreal backrooms, queerness, suicidal ideation and a tender understanding of what it FEELS like to be mentally ill. I felt this book deep in my bones, and, as dark as it is, it was powerful to feel so seen."—Isa Mazzei, screenwriter of CAM
"Coup de Grâce is an eerie, twisty, mind-bendingly enjoyable masterpiece of truly Backroom-sized proportions. Compulsive AF"—Gemma Amor, Bram Stoker-nominated author of Dear Laura
“Mind-bendingly tense, Ajram winds the reader through prose that arcs and fizzles with the distraught terror of survival. Coup de Grâce was both fun and terrifying -- I'm in awe of the sharp turn of every sentence and how we explore both the map of the novel's world and the map of Vicken's mind.”—Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me
“A stunner. Ajram makes earnest ennui feel like the most natural state of a story. Don't assume you get to just read; you're part of this too.”—Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth and A Light Most Hateful
“An aching spectacle of bleakness and jewelled prose; Coup de Grâce is one hell of a debut for multi-talented Sofia Ajram.”—Cassandra Khaw, author of The Salt Grows Heavy
“Coup de Grâce is a harrowing exploration of the expanding labyrinth of despair and the self. Its liminal melancholy will linger. Sofia Ajram is a writer to watch.”—Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts
“Sofia uses gorgeous and unsettling prose to trap us in a hellish brutalist concrete labyrinth. Reading Coup de Grâce was a wonderful, stressful experience that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.” Trevor Henderson, author of Scarewaves
“Bleak, unrelenting, and surprising at every turn, the torturous inner maze of depression becomes literal in Sofia Ajram's nightmarish vision of an endlessly expanding House of Leaves.”—Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker award-nominated author of All the White Spaces and Where the Dead Wait
“Coup de Grâce is a novella woven with cold elegance like sea breeze drifting from the ocean at night through liminal spaces both seen but felt. It is breaths beckoning from deep within an endless tunnel underground with moments of unexpected humour and absurdity. And it is life, death, and hope’s interwoven thoughts in poetry and refreshing experimentalism.”—Ai Jiang, Hugo award nominee and Bram Stoker award nominated author of Linghun
“The decision, the ride, the beautiful stranger, the end you always knew would find you - Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce is wholly original and totally, despairingly, passionately alive.”—Kathe Koja, author of Dark Factory and The Cipher
“Alienating, exquisite, and disturbing; a poem in blood and concrete.”—Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt and Cuckoo
“Relentless, terrifying, gorgeous, and perfect; one of the most powerful books I've ever been lost inside. This is a beautiful nightmare built by a genius architect and I'll be shocked if I read anything better all year.”—Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall
“Forwarded with the funereal poetics of dream-logic but, wait: awake. And therefore, no dream, but nightmare. Still, despite the horror, Ajram’s spirited voice is as self-evident as a solitary bright hue in a wide grey world. What do we look for in books, in stories, if not signs of life? Coup de Grâce is teeming with rare life.”—Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Incidents Around the House
"A slender, terrifying volume in which to lose yourself completely. Sofia Ajram’s remarkable debut Coup de Grâce is a lyrically written yet shockingly raw depiction of its narrator’s descent into the depths of suicidal depression. It is rare that surreal horror bites this deep or tears this hard at the reader’s emotions. I was floored. Highly recommended."—David Demchuk, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Bone Mother and RED X
“The ultimate bummer of publishing is you're asked to compare books to other, similar books and movies in order to help sell them, and while you can do that with Coup de Grâce ("It's part Cronenberg, part Danielewski, part Greek myth!") those 'comps' don't really get at how vital and new and achingly now the novella is in its story, its melancholy... and its scares. A true achievement.”—Adam Cesare, author of Clown in a Cornfield
Equally haunting and heartbreaking, this complex meditation on belonging announces an exciting new voice in experimental horror.—Publishers Weekly, starred review
A gripping story that is as brutal as it is beautiful...A stellar option for fans of liminal-space horror like The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher, as well as those who enjoy intense tales of an unreliable narrator exploring a terrifying and mysterious landscape, such as The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling.—Booklist, starred review
Even at its darkest, Coup de Grace is a paean to beauty that tempts you to live.—F(r)iction Lit
A tour de force, a triumph... that defies the confines of its novella format, this is a book that will haunt you, challenge you, perhaps even change you.—FanFiAddict
This one is going to end up on many years’ best lists.—The Lineup
Ajram is daring and ambitious to choose to write a fiction entirely around the concept of suicide. Vicken’s experience is treated with surprising tenderness and empathy. While there are certainly moments of terror and gross-out gore, the real horror in this novella is the window it grants on an experience of depression and how it might feel to see death as the only way out. It is a horror of deep feeling: beautiful and terrifying.—Quill & Quire
“A moving and gorgeously written debut novella, Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce cycles through vertigo, claustrophobia, existential dread and body horror—and yet it’s not without a sense of hope. Immersive and strange, highly recommended.”—Christi Nogle, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Beulah
“Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce is a guided tour through the overlap of geographies real and reflected, imaginary and internal. Seductively sardonic, Ajram’s narrator invites readers along through the stations of his breakdown, a journey that proves to be as irresistible as it may be inescapable. Doomed but driven, recursive yet revelatory, Coup de Grâce compresses and kaleidoscopes, entangles and explodes. It unfolds itself to itself as much as to its readers… and there’s nothing else quite like it.”—Gordon B. White, finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards
“A truly unsettling and uneasy novella. Ajram perfectly captures a setting that is at once vast and empty, yet confining and claustrophobic, blending the mundane and the fantastical, and exploring horrors that exist both within and outside the human mind. A distinct voice and vision.”—A.C. Wise, Bram Stoker award-nominated author of The Ghost Sequences
“Coup de Grâce isn't merely absorbing—I feel as if I was digested by this book, dissolving bit by bit with every flip of the page. Sofia Ajram has constructed a stunning mobius strip of a nightmare, equal parts Clive Barker and M.C. Escher, full of fleshy architecture and seductively serpentine prose.”—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters
"The literary equivalent of a high-fever delirium, of picking at a wound, of an acid burn in the back of your throat. Ajram will have your nightmares wrapped around his finger, and you will be reluctant to come up for air."—Andrew Joseph White, New York Times bestselling author of Hell Followed With Us and The Spirit Bears Its Teeth
“Coup de Grâce is a fearless gem by a singular new voice in Sofia Ajram. Intimate and epic all at once, this story knows you already, and leads you by the hand into a vast and unimaginable horror.”—Andy Mitton, director of The Witch in the Window
"Ajram understands the itch and gnaw of self-annihilation, constructing a labyrinth from its thrum and beckon. Coup de Grâce is an abject exploration of life with the lights turned off; a book that gradually loses its mind as it’s read."—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
"It’s become a rare joy to read something in mainstream genre fiction that values opaque dread, atmosphere, and WTF-ness just as much as standard story beats. Sofia Ajram has that kind of gift, with the eloquent prose and forked tongue to match. With irresistible, despairing beauty, Coup de Grâce invites you to get hopelessly lost within the labyrinthine mind of a formidable new force in horror."—Michael Wehunt, author of The Inconsolables and Greener Pastures
A visceral, hallucinatory meditation on illness, mental and otherwise. I haven’t read something with this much resonation since Dazai’s No Longer Human. Coup de Grâce is a bleak, philosophical look into what it means to be alive, for better or worse, where the only thing scarier than mangled monstrosities is the inexplicable world one is forced to roam simply by breathing. We’re all waiting on a train. Some smile on the benches. Some cry on the tracks.—Scott J. Moses, author of Our Own Unique Affliction
This immersive liminal-space novella illustrates, brutally and beautifully, the horror of mental illness and compels readers to finish the story in a single sitting.—Library Journal
"In the ’90s, Alice Notley gave us a feminist subversion of the epic poem tradition in her Descent of Alette. In 2020’s horror, Sofia Ajram uses a similar setting to show the reader that Dante’s Inferno can play out all in one poor soul’s mind. Coup de Grâce is a book for abstract horror fans prepared to navigate the scary stories our own minds tell us when we get lost in the maze of our mental health." - Seattle Book Review
About the Author
Sofia Ajram (he/she) is a metalsmith and literary horror writer who specializes in feverish stories of anomalous architecture and gay pining. He is the editor of the forthcoming Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror. She has also given lectures on contemporary horror films at Monstrum Montreal and serves as a moderator of r/horror on Reddit. Sofia lives in Montreal with her cat Isa. Find them on Twitter and Instagram @sofiaajram.
