Tor Nightfire has set a release date for Mr. Lonelyhearts, from author Clay McLeod Chapman who has already banked a Bram Stoker Award and a spot on the USA Today bestseller list. The book arrives March 23, 2027, and is built around a very atypical monster: a classroom CPR dummy who refuses to stay forgotten.
The novel opens in a Grade 7 health class, where a teenager named Jenn and her friends, a clique she calls “the Cöven,” smuggle the room’s resuscitation mannequin out to a sleepover and pour their adolescent longing into him, naming him Mr. Lonelyhearts. They grow up. They get real boyfriends. They forget him… but he does not forget them. Years later, after a breakup leaves Jenn shattered, Mr. Lonelyhearts comes back to put the pieces together himself, on terms that are entirely his own.
The story is familiar ground for Chapman, whose earlier novels Devil Inside and Wake Up and Open Your Eyes built his reputation on finding the monstrous inside the mundane. Tor Nightfire is calling Mr. Lonelyhearts his most emotionally vicious work to date, using the shape of a supernatural slasher to take aim at loneliness, toxic attachment, and what happens when longing persists. Readers of Grady Hendrix, CJ Leede, and Stephen Graham Jones take note.
Mr. Lonelyhearts is the closest thing to a nightmare on paper I’ve encountered in many years. Terrifying, heartbreaking, and profoundly unsettling, it digs into the psychological wounds of today’s isolation crisis—digs hard enough to make us bleed.
Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Carry Me to My Grave
Nick Cutter called it proof that Chapman “can make anything terrifying,” while Thomas Olde Heuvelt praised the novel as “razor-sharp, wildly entertaining, and deeply unsettling.”
Mr. Lonelyhearts follows Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes and lands in hardcover, ebook, and audio on March 23, 2027. Tor Nightfire has not yet released a final cover price or page count; more details are posted on the publisher’s book page, and the novel is already listed for preorder at Barnes & Noble.
