Book Review: Headlights by C.J. Leede

Danny boy has the shine! But wait, this is not a review of The Shining by Stephen King.

Headlights by C.J. Leede follows Special Agent Daniel Stansfield on what is supposed to be his final day with the FBI—an exit from a career that has left him burned out and hollowed out. Instead, he is pulled back into a disturbing case in Denver, where people are waking up on highways with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skins of victims they cannot explain. The only consistent thread is a chilling detail: a strand of stranger’s hair tied around each victim’s tongue.

It is a strong, unsettling premise—one that immediately promises psychological horror wrapped in procedural investigation, with the added tension of a protagonist forced to confront the past he tried to outrun. Daniel’s return to Denver becomes not just a professional obligation, but a descent into personal history and unresolved trauma.

Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t fully live up to the expectation.

There are moments where the concept feels like it could truly lean into its strengths: the body horror of the crime scenes, the mystery of identity theft at a visceral level, and the psychological unraveling of an agent already on the edge. But those elements often take a backseat to a persistent fixation on tone, influence, and internal reference points that begin to overwhelm the narrative.

Daniel is frequently referred to as having “the shine”, and is framed in a manner that makes this novel feel like a strange love affair to Stephen King’s The Shining and its broader mythology. While homage in horror is nothing new, here it becomes difficult to separate inspiration from repetition. The references to King’s works and adjacent horror touchpoints appear so frequently that they begin to pull attention away from the story itself rather than deepen it.

There is also a noticeable imbalance in focus. Instead of spending more time in the investigative horror of the killings—the kind of grounded, methodical dread that could elevate the book into something closer to a Thomas Harris-style procedural—the narrative often leans into dry internal monologue and a central romantic fixation that dilutes tension. The emotional throughline could have added depth, but instead it repeatedly interrupts the momentum of the central mystery.

Stylistically, the inconsistency in voice is hard to ignore. First-person narration can be powerful when tightly controlled, especially in psychological horror, but here it fluctuates in tone and intensity in a way that makes it difficult to stay fully anchored in Daniel’s perspective. Combined with the heavy reliance on pop-horror reference points, the result feels uneven—at times atmospheric, but often distracted from its own strengths.

What makes this especially frustrating is that the core idea has real potential. The imagery is strong. The central case is disturbing in a memorable way. And Daniel himself could have been a compelling vehicle for a darker, more grounded descent into trauma and investigation. With more restraint and a deeper commitment to its own horror identity, this could have been a standout procedural thriller.

Instead, Headlights often feels like it is reaching for a conversation with horror history rather than fully committing to telling its own story within it.

There is a version of this novel that leans harder into the brutality of the casework, strips back the external references, and lets the horror speak for itself. That version would be far more unsettling—and far more memorable. Instead, we are left with this.