Alison Romig at Delacorte has acquired Stranglehold, by Cale Plett, in an exclusive submission, for publication in fall 2027. Stranglehold is a queer YA horror novel that brings together the smalltown, twisted miracle of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass with the frozen, cosmic dread of True Detective: Night Country. It’s a long, rattling panic attack driven by an ancient god from the old world, revenants serving as its lungs, and a coming harvest that could slaughter the entire population with the hands of their own loved ones. Amy Tompkins at Transatlantic Agency handled the deal for world English rights.
In one night, a pair of horrifying accidents leave both Hayden’s best friend and their new crush in closed caskets. But as a snowstorm isolates the highway town in their grief, the dead come wandering in from the cold, along with everyone else lost to suffocation during the past decade, from the ones the town just had a funeral for to the children who were buried alive in the snow hill collapse where Hayden first saw the man with the broken staff who’s been appearing at the site of each death.
You don’t spit in the face of a miracle. You don’t ask questions when your friends and family return, even when they breathe rasping breaths instead of saying where they’ve been. Even if they have panicked eyes and their nervous hands that only seem to calm when they have something to wrap tightly around. Yet with the returned growing more volatile with each passing hour, Hayden digs in the forgotten corners, praying there’s something left in them to save.
Cale Plett is a nonbinary, genderfluid writer from Winnipeg whose queer YA short fiction and poetry have been published in numerous journals. Growing up on a dead-end road out of sight of the nearest neighbors, one of their favorite childhood activities was deliberately getting lost in the woods and trying to find their way out again before dark. Their first novel, Wavelength is published by Groundwood Books and received a starred review in Booklist. The Saw Mouth, their YA horror debut, comes out in spring 2026, to be followed by Stranglehold in 2027.
Cale is represented by Amy Tompkins.
Congratulations, Cale!