Breathe In, Bleed Out follows a protagonist who is tough but deteriorating, as she travels into the southern California desert with a group of old friends for what should be a relaxing retreat. It turns out to be anything but. Brian McAuley (Curse of the Reaper; Candy Cain Kills) brings horror, snarky humor, and an array of increasingly inventive deaths to this reunion-turned-nightmare road trip.

"Dragging a body through six inches of snow is even harder than I expected," begins Hannah's narrative. This is only the first in a series of nightmares, flashbacks, and hallucinations in which she will revisit her fiancé's demise on a winter hiking trip gone wrong. Ben was the outdoorsy one, who had introduced Hannah to experiences like their last one together, with crampons and ice axes and an enigmatic end. It will take most of the book for Hannah to reveal what exactly went wrong, leaving the reader wondering what secrets she's keeping.

As a first-person narrator, Hannah raises questions for her audience. When is she hallucinating? What really happened to Ben? How many Xanax has she had today? (She's not sure, either.)

The morning after her opening-sequence nightmare revisiting Ben's death, Hannah heads off to a shift as a medical intern at a Los Angeles hospital. Treating her grief, anxiety, and insomnia with prescribed medication, she makes an error that nearly kills a patient and gets her suspended indefinitely. It's also her birthday, and her longtime best friend Tess has been trying to reach her, although Hannah's been avoiding her friends. Now, newly freed from employment, Hannah finds her defenses weakened, and agrees to spend a weekend near Joshua Tree at a swank "healing retreat." It's so exclusive that there's no web presence at all, just a shadowy leader who calls himself Guru Pax. "There are few things more gross than the G-word in LA wellness culture, where self-appointed experts prey upon the insecure and the vulnerable," Hannah confides to the reader; nonetheless, off she goes.

Tess, "the emo girl turned Wicca woman," is recently off yet another breakup, furthering her "serial-relationship status." The best friends are joined by Luna, formerly Lauren, a "certified trauma-informed yoga instructor." Hannah sees her as a chameleon, who passes off "disordered eating as a 'health-conscious lifestyle.' " Luna's boyfriend Jared is worse still, a boozing frat boy turned boozing digital ad salesman. And then there's Miles, a hot and successful DJ with whom Hannah has longstanding, unresolved sexual tension. The fivesome heads into the desert toward the mysterious Avidya Healing Retreat.

Along the way, they stop at a little desert town for a drink, and an altercation with a local. The bad vibes stack up, complete with the purported ghost of a 19th-century bank robber-turned-gold miner (hat, pickax, and all) and an Indian burial ground. Then they are truly off-grid: upon entering Avidya, the friends must give up their phones to a young Native American woman holding a burlap sack. Tess has billed this weekend as being all about "the hot springs and sauna, the yoga and sound baths, the nature hikes and stargazing," but amid Jared's whining, Luna's posturing, and Miles's flirting, Hannah is having trouble relaxing. Her dreams and her demons have followed her into the desert, and she struggles to tell them apart from reality. And then people start dying.

Breathe In, Bleed Out opens with Ben's dead body, but his cause of death remains unexplained for much of the novel, even as the body count rises. Ben's demise, and the obvious question about Hannah's involvement, plays neatly against the puzzle of the killer at the new-age retreat. In this way, gore bookends the story, with dry wit and playful humor along the way.

McAuley takes the time to give each of Hannah's friends a backstory, developing them beyond type. While the bulk of the novel is told in Hannah's first-person perspective, other characters enjoy brief sections in the spotlight, in close third person. As the Avidya retreat turns bloody and then bloodier, readers' sympathies will be expertly turned one way and then another through a series of ever-more-elaborate kills worthy of any slasher flick--the sauna, the hot spring, and the crystal in the center of the pool each offer unique and cinematic opportunities for fans of a gruesome and imaginative death scene. The killer's identity remains unknown through masterful twists and turns, with one character after another appearing to be the villain. The key elements of the horror genre are all accounted for, but secrets persist: McAuley keeps his readers guessing until a final dramatic reveal.

For fans of slasher flicks with a touch of satirical wit and a sense of fun amid the bloodbath, Breathe In, Bleed Out offers an entertaining escape that will have readers rethinking the yoga prop. --Julia Kastner

Brian McAuley

As a WGA screenwriter, Brian McAuley has written everything from family sitcoms (Fuller House) to psychological thriller films (Dismissed). He is teaches screenwriting at Arizona State University's Sidney Poitier New American Film School. His debut novel, Curse of the Reaper, was named one of the Best Horror Books of 2022 by Esquire and is in development for a film adaptation. His holiday slasher novella Candy Cain Kills earned praise from several publications, leading to the sequel, Candy Cain Kills Again: The Second Slaying. McAuley's Breathe In, Bleed Out, a cinematic horror novel set in the remote southern California desert, will be published by Poisoned Pen Press on September 2, 2025.

How did this book begin for you--with character, setting, or a scene?

The setting was the key for me. What's a location that would lend itself to a spooky story, where people feel trapped? And the props and the milieu of the location should lend themselves to very specific death set pieces. Once I know it's a wellness healing retreat, I know that my protagonist is someone who needs healing, and I reverse engineer, finding the personal, deeper emotional well that's always hiding. I think I'm writing a fun slasher, and then I get deep into the book, and I'm like, oh, I'm working on some heavy emotional stuff. I want it to be an immersive experience. What's a setting where you feel like you can go with the characters, journey there and then end up trapped with them?

How does the book format differ from the classic slasher film?

I plot my stories the same way that I do with my feature film screenwriting work, in terms of character arcs. I have a corkboard here where I'm plotting my next book, and I put my index cards up and arrange them in a three-act structure the same way whether it's a script or a book. But for me the joy of the novel is the depth of character that I get to go into, because screenwriting is all "show, don't tell." You can't get into the characters' heads, because the script is only what the camera can film--it's like a blueprint for the camera. In a novel, you go directly into a character's experience. Writing from Hannah's first-person perspective allowed me to get into her emotions and her thought processes, both as she's processing trauma and trying to heal, and also as she's trying to figure out what's happening and put clues together. The novel allows a much greater depth of interiority. Similarly, the characters that don't survive the story in slasher movies tend to be pretty one-dimensional, because there isn't much opportunity to flesh them out. In a book, I try to embrace the opportunity to give them three-dimensional lives before I end their three-dimensional lives.

Why give those other characters their own brief POVs?

In movies, you'll often cut away to peripheral characters and see them get killed off while our protagonist has no idea what's happening. We'll cut back to our protagonist and they'll be none the wiser. It creates that dramatic irony where we know something that the protagonist doesn't, so our anxiety is especially piqued. It's a tricky balance, right? You don't want an audience too far ahead of the protagonist--you want them to be figuring things out with the character. But it pulls you in deeper if you have a piece of the puzzle that they don't, and you're trying to figure it out together.

What makes Hannah a captivating protagonist?

I love flawed and messy characters. That's just my reality as a human on this planet. And it's a way I try to play with common slasher tropes, like the final girl in the old-school films--Laurie Strode in Halloween is this very pure, virginal character while her friends are off having sex and doing drugs, and therefore they get killed. And that's a very boring and problematic trope to keep doing. I'm more interested in characters who have made mistakes and are riddled with guilt, or who have trauma they are trying to work through. Hannah really needs support, and yet she's been pushing people away, and that's a very relatable dynamic. I wanted a character who was deeply in need of healing, and trying, and failing, at the start of the book, through different avenues like working too much and leaning on medication too heavily. It turned into an interesting journey, especially writing in first person. She came alive very quickly on the page. I was really grateful to have her as my north star through the story.

What is the role of humor in horror?

For me it's essential. One of the first horror movies that I saw growing up was Evil Dead, and it's so over the top, gory, and slapstick humor is mixed in, and it's just fun. How fun horror can be is really a guiding principle. A modern idol for me is Jordan Peele. Every film he makes balances humor with horror so very well. In horror you have to build up tension and release it, over and over again, and humor can do that so well. Or use comedy to disarm them and then throw a scare in unexpectedly. That, for me, is part of the joy of playing in this genre: to mix those two up.

Why the wellness retreat?

I lived in L.A. for 10 years and I saw a lot of this culture firsthand. I try to write books about things that I have mixed feelings about. Yoga is amazing, meditation, so many aspects of the healing wellness culture are genuinely beneficial. And also there are people who use that as an opportunity to exploit people who are in a desperate place or who need healing. That's where it can get sticky, as with anything: when somebody with bad intentions gets mixed in. It felt like a prime opportunity to throw murder into the mix of that world.

What do you enjoy about teaching?

To be able to talk about story and character as my day job is a dream. I mostly teach writing workshops, and working with college age students who are not just finding their creative voice but finding their identity in the world is such a privilege. And a writing workshop is such a great place to explore that. You're trying to find stories that feel personal and are in tune with the genres that you like. I don't take lightly the responsibility to try and tap into a connection with each student and see: What are you trying to tell in a story? What matters to you? Can we focus that so that you can take it with you into the world, whether you pursue writing or not? I think writing is such a perfect outlet to get to know yourself better. --Julia Kastner