Delicious Monsters

Told in alternating timelines, the novel follows two Black Canadian girls whose lives orbit a haunted mansion in northern Ontario. In the past timeline, 17-year-old Daisy narrates her experience moving onto the property with her mother, Grace. In the present timeline, set 10 years later, 19-year-old Brittney, a college student and intern at the media company Torte, investigates the mansion's dark history for her YouTube series Haunted while trying to escape her own controlling mother.

Daisy can see the dead, who appear as translucent figures drawn to human suffering. Some, called corporeals, are solid enough to pass for living people and capable of physical harm. In Toronto, Daisy is reeling from being dumped by Noah Durand, a 21-year-old white university student who was her mentor through a school program. When she confronts him, Noah dismisses their relationship as mentorship and calls her "obsessed." Devastated, Daisy agrees to move when Grace reveals that her late brother-in-law, Peter Belanger, has left them a large estate near Timmins, Ontario. Grace has spent years promising the house will bring financial freedom, though she shares nothing about her history there.

They arrive to find a four-story mansion and a smaller dwelling called a bunkie, where Grace insists they live. Grace plans to run the mansion as an Airbnb but forbids Daisy from entering it. Daisy notices an eerie absence of ghosts on the grounds and discovers a worm emerging from her scalp, though when Grace checks, nothing is there.

In the present timeline, Brittney cohosts Haunted with her best friend and partner, Jayden. Brittney's mother is a bestselling author whose memoir credits a stay at the "Miracle Mansion" with transforming her into a reformed parent, but Brittney knows this is a lie. After their pitch for a season titled "Forgotten Black Girls" is rejected as too niche, they pivot to investigating the mansion under the title "Houses That Kill," guided by an anonymous contact feeding them leads about its buried history.

At the property, Daisy meets the Okeke family, their neighbors, including King, a boy her age with genuine psychic abilities that the mansion blocks entirely. She also encounters Ivy, a local girl with long braids and orange sunglasses who lives farther out in the area, and whom King warns her to avoid. Against Grace's orders, Daisy enters the mansion, which is packed with ghosts, and in a bedroom extracts a foot-long worm from her scalp. Outside, she falls into a thornbush and is attacked by butcherbirds, small carnivorous shrikes, though Grace and King see only her thrashing.

Brittney and Jayden interview people from Grace's past in Timmins. A childhood friend, Helga Bouchard, hints that Peter's physical affection toward Grace made her uncomfortable. Katie Kurukulasuriya, Grace's former friend and Peter's piano student, reveals that Grace once tried to put a maggot in Katie's ear for "protection," growing larvae inside a goat's stomach. Katie refuses to name what she and Grace feared in the house, saying it is Grace's truth to share.

When Daisy, King, and Ivy enter the mansion together, they hear guests being terrorized behind a locked door. Ivy states calmly that the door will not open until the guests "give something up." The couple later checks out with no memory and leaves a five-star review. A young woman dies in the mansion of a brain aneurysm, the same cause of death as Peter. Daisy begins losing time, earning perfect grades on work she cannot remember doing. Grace finally admits the house speaks to her and that she placed a protective maggot in Daisy's ear when Daisy was seven.

Daisy visits Aunt Dione, Grace's sister, who whispers through a video doorbell that she failed to believe Grace about "what Peter did." Grace then reveals the truth: Peter sexually abused her throughout her childhood summers, beginning when she was 10. She told Dione at 14, and Dione dismissed it. The mansion became Grace's only confidant, offering to torment Peter in exchange for Grace luring other victims into rooms where the house fed on their fear. Grace also admits she deliberately brought Daisy's father, Jordan, to the mansion because the house told her children conceived inside it would be able to see the dead. Daisy erupts, screaming that her existence was engineered as a tool.

A media crew arrives to film at the property. Daisy tries to force Ivy to pass on using a technique Grace trained her in, but guilt makes her falter. Ivy retaliates by attacking a crew member with a fireplace poker. Because Ivy is invisible to the living, Daisy is blamed, and the incident goes viral.

Daisy surrenders, letting Ivy possess her body for weeks while she sleeps inside her own mind. Grace begins leaving daily notes of apology and love with packed lunches. King fills every car ride with personal things he always wanted to share. Eventually, Grace opens her arms and says she cares about nothing but her daughter. Daisy chooses to return.

Ivy seizes Grace with thorn branches and drags her into the mansion. Grace reveals a final secret: Before leaving the property as a pregnant teenager, she promised the house Dione's future child as a replacement gardener, even sabotaging Dione's birth control. That child was Ivy, Peter and Dione's daughter, whom Peter kept hidden in the mansion's basement. When Ivy witnessed Peter abusing a student, he locked her in a walk-in freezer, where accumulated ghosts made the cold lethal. Ivy died, became a powerful corporeal, and killed Peter with a brain aneurysm.

Ivy threatens to kill Grace unless Daisy surrenders her body permanently. The house tries to break Daisy's love for Grace through a terrifying vision, but Daisy resists. She tricks Ivy into entering a room that triggers Ivy's traumatic memory of the freezer and helps Ivy realize she has the power to open the door herself. Daisy offers a deal: She will die in the mansion so her ghost can remain with Ivy forever if Ivy releases Grace and stops the house from feeding on the living. Daisy takes pills and alcohol, but when King and Grace plead through the sealed freezer door, Ivy asks if Daisy truly wants to be saved. Daisy whispers that she wants a chance to live, and Ivy opens the door.

Daisy survives, completes a year at a mental health facility, and becomes a nationally recognized garden designer. In the present timeline, Brittney and Jayden stay overnight at the mansion, where Brittney meets a girl she does not recognize as a ghost. They conduct a climactic interview with Grace and Dione together. Grace publicly reveals Peter's abuse, and Dione admits she knew Ivy was her daughter but abandoned her out of fear. Both women acknowledge they let Ivy remain a nameless Jane Doe.

Daisy reveals herself as the anonymous contact who guided the investigation. She confirms Ivy is still in the house, still her friend, and that she visits every summer. Brittney and Jayden rename their season "Forgotten Black Girls," and Brittney blocks her mother's number for good. The novel closes at a glass memorial greenhouse Daisy designed for Ivy near the mansion, where a plaque reads: "Here lies Ivy Odlin. She will never be forgotten again." Ivy's ghost rests on Daisy's shoulder as they watch the premiere of the show that will finally tell her story.