Healing comes at a price—that’s the godfearing truth. Growing up on a farm in the foothills, Sierra Branham is used to that bitterness in her granny’s folk magic and father’s addiction. But when her dad misses her graduation after finally getting clean, she’s sure it’s something darker than his usual pills.

After tracking her dad’s last-known location to a methadone clinic, Sierra meets Blight, an intoxicating and infuriating nonbinary caseworker. With Blight comes answers about Sierra’s dad and questions about her sexuality as they work with the clinic’s harm reduction program. While exploring their relationship and the opioid-riddled underworld, they discover a disease creeping through users’ veins like kudzu—and it looks a whole lot more like Granny’s magic than any ordinary infection.

Though her family’s folk healing seems to be at the heart of the outbreak, Sierra hesitates to take on her dark inheritance. Sure, it might give power and privilege enough to confront the drugs and disease, but it’s also what fuels cycles of addiction, abuse, and exploitation. As infectious iron rusts through the bodies of those she loves and surging kudzu threatens to bury the family’s hateful history once and for all, Sierra must decide which monsters to slay and which to become.

You’ll Bleed The First Time is a queer horromance complete at 75,000 words that can be pitched as “Booksmart meets It Follows.” The novel puts a feminist spin on the trope of death and destruction following premarital sex. It will appeal to readers looking for explorations of purity culture and repression, including fans of Trang Thanh Tran’s They Bloom At Night and Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. 

Three weeks till graduation and McKay’s got it all figured out. She has a killer suit for prom, her childhood crush on queen bee Camille somehow turned into a real relationship, and the two of them have been having such a good time that even the mandatory senior year sex ed isn’t too miserable. But although their teacher, Ms. Whitney, is pretty chill (and pregnant out of wedlock herself), the state requires the class to be abstinence-only and strictly heterosexual, leaving McKay with some questions about prom night.

Before she and Camille can take their relationship to the next level, Ms. Whitney busts the afterparty, and instead of her usual easy-going smile and ill-fitting cardigan, she’s smothered in flames and full of righteous wrath. Even though everyone saw her burn to death, Ms. Whitney shows up to school on Monday—still screaming in the voice of a thousand souls, and she isn’t the only one speaking that way. A handful of other senior girls are also possessed, seething, and sanctimonious, and it looks like whatever it is got its hooks in after they each had sex.

What had been a lighthearted senior spring is now full of fire and brimstone, with the swiftly spreading scourge keeping McKay and Camille at arm’s length for fear of being burned. The abstinence-only curriculum never covered anything like this, but if they’re going to get their friends back, take the next step in their relationship, and survive until graduation, they’ll need to figure out fast if you really can fight fire with fire.