The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

This instant New York Times bestseller is a visceral Victorian gothic horror of a young autistic trans boy who can commune with spirits, forced into a haunted sanitorium.

Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all.

London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he'll be married by the end of the year. It doesn't matter that he's needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.

After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton's Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton's innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn't break him first.


Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

"An absolute sucker punch of a novel. While the gore and body horror are exactly as brutal and artful as you'd expect from Andrew Joseph White, there's an undercurrent of validating tenderness that makes this story wholly unique. This book will slice you open, shift through your insides, and stitch you closed anew." - Kayla Cottingham

"Andrew Joseph White brings his phenomenal talent and searing prose to an unflinching tale of a violet-eyed boy, desperate spirits, and very human monsters. The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is as brutal and necessary as a surgical incision." - Kate Alice Marshall

"Andrew Joseph White continues to break boundaries into new, deeply chilling forms. The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is a merciless yet masterful dissection of gothic horror that spares no anesthesia, and thankfully so. The hauntings in these pages will find their way into you, so deep that nothing will be able to cut them out." - Ryan La Sala

"A book that cracks and spreads the ribs before massaging your heart underneath, this is a must-read that will haunt you long after it's over, proving that Andrew Joseph White is the reigning king, draping visceral horror in a feral kind of hope." - Jamison Shea

"With surgical precision, The Spirit Bares its Teeth exposes the menace of conformity in society. I devoured every vicious and human sentence. Let Silas Bell tear you apart, then stitch you back together." - Trang Thanh Tran