DEMON SONG, Kelsea’s sECOND horror novella, WILL BE PUBLISHED BY TITAN BOOKS on September 30, 2025!
Content Warnings
domestic abuse, violence (including sexual assault), supernatural possession, body horror, reference to suicide
About the book
An eerie and unsettling gothic horror about the heady and hungry price of fame, drawing on Chinese mythology. Perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson and Cassandra Khaw.
Places like this have a history. Desires. And this one is famished.
Megan and her mom are on the run after narrowly escaping the clutches of an abusive man who dragged them from Portland to Beijing. With few options, Megan’s mom turns to an old friend who offers them room and board in Huihuang Opera Theater in exchange for cleaning the ancient building.
Between her rusty Mandarin and constant reminders that she’s an outsider, Megan struggles with loneliness—until she meets Kristy, the glamorous young lead in the operatic adaptation of “The Monkey King and the White Bone Demon.” Soon, Megan’s free time is split between reading a battered copy of the Chinese classic that inspired the opera and her budding new friendship; Kristy’s love of singing brings out Megan’s long-buried ambitions.
But the opera house has its secrets. There are passages within the walls that shouldn’t be there, and the more Megan delves into that old book, the more the myths begin to bleed into real life. As Megan finds it increasingly difficult to separate reality from folklore, she must uncover a decades-old mystery to discover the true, horrifying secret of the opera house before it casts its hungry eyes on her.
“Utterly addicting and an immediate new obsession. This is the kind of story that consumes you more and more with each page and I couldn’t get enough of this darkly gothic, sharp-edged tale of wicked bargains, alluring demons, and desperate longing.”
—CG Drews, NYT Bestselling author of Don’t Let The Forest In
“Demon Song is a fast-paced exploration of the power of performance and the cost of desire by the queen of thrilling murder mysteries, twisty red herrings, and complex mother-daughter relationships.”
—Ai Jiang, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award-winning author of Linghun and A Palace Near the Wind
"Magical and forlorn. Yu deftly blends the fantastical imagery of a classic tale with a modern story of having to grow up too fast, joining elegant theater with familial cycles of pain. Demon Song makes your heart ache right to the end."
—Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth
"Demon Song reaches such a high note, a blissful blend of Chinese folklore and Shirley Jackson, reading like The Haunting of Hill's Opera House, where phantoms flit on pitches no living organism can continue to read sanely."
—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
"An appetizingly dark Gothic served dripping in mood and laced with Chinese mythology. Yu's love of theatre sings throughout this musical nightmare."
—Eden Royce, Bram Stoker-nominated author of Hollow Tongue
“Demon Song spreads its lovely darkness through the eerie passageways of an aged Beijing opera house, the perfect setting for its many charms: The horror rises like an aria, the evil is enchanting behind its mask, and Kelsea Yu’s haunting prose moves like music to its skin-crawling conclusion. If House of Leaves absorbed the best of 1960s Asian horror films and classic weird fiction into its hallways, this poisonous novella could be the marrow of such a strange architecture.”
—Michael Wehunt, author of The October Film Haunt and Greener Pastures
“A Chinese theatre horror with themes of intergenerational trauma and marginalisation delivered in haunting, lyrical prose, Kelsea Yu’s Demon Song resounds with originality and flair. Featuring a historic tale which blends seamlessly into the contemporary narrative like a traditional zhiguai, Yu’s white bone spirit beguiles and terrifies. A startling new voice in Asian horror, Yu will undoubtedly feature on future award lists.”
—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author and editor of Black Cranes and Tortured Willows
“Demon Song is a Phantom of the Opera for the decaying and mysterious Beijing Opera House, with Megan—displaced from her Portland home, and wary about her new living situation—caught in its glamorous web. Yu's uncanny debut deals concisely with friendship, domestic violence, and her protagonist's budding (demi)sexuality, without ever losing the unearthly touch of the ancient world behind the curtain.”
—Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of All the White Spaces
“Characters to sink into and a gorgeous setting, this modern Gothic fantasy touched on the soul of so many of my favourite classics, but stands unique through the mesmerizing use of folklore and excellent unfolding of mystery right up to the end.”
—Alex Woodroe, author of Whisperwood and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Editor-in-Chief at Tenebrous Press
“A haunting story that’ll please fans of Black Swan and Suspiria, but with a distinctly Chinese folklore hue. It dances right up to phantasmagoric while still commanding a captive audience.”
—Matt Blairstone, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Publisher at Tenebrous Press
READ AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT from DEMON SONG ON FANGORIA:
From Demon Song’s announcement in Publishers Marketplace:
Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of BOUND FEET Kelsea Yu's DEMON SONG, a gothic horror novella about the heady and hungry price of fame, following a young girl and her mother who move to a Beijing opera house and discover a terrifying, demonic secret haunting its walls, to Daniel Carpenter at Titan Books, in a nice deal, for publication in September 2025, by Jennifer Azantian at Azantian Literary Agency (world English).
From The Bookseller’s ARTICLE ABOUT the Demon Song book deal:
Titan Books to publish 'beautifully uncanny' horror from Kelsea Yu
by Katie Fraser
Titan Books has acquired the rights to Demon Song, an "unsettling" gothic horror novella from Kelsea Yu, inspired by Chinese mythology.
World English language rights were acquired by fiction editor Daniel Carpenter from Jennifer Azantian at the Azantian Literary Agency for publication in September 2025…
For full text, read the article here!