TENDER BEASTS

A Black Canadian private school student tries to solve a series of gruesome murders connected to her family.

Seventeen-year-old Sunny Behre is good at fooling people. After the death of her mother, Ainsley, Sunny embraces her role as the perpetually smiling golden child among the five siblings. Her family owns Behre Academy, a Toronto private high school that depends on donations to educate young people in need. With Ainsley gone, Sunny considers herself the ambassador for the school. When Dom, her younger brother, is charged with murdering his girlfriend, Ainsley’s loss feels even more pronounced. One day after school, Sunny stumbles upon the chilling sight of the mangled body of a fellow student—and of Dom, who’s been released while awaiting trial, with blood on his hands. Dom maintains his innocence, and although Sunny isn’t entirely convinced, she races to uncover the actual killer. As the campus body count ramps up, Sunny realizes that Ainsley kept secrets, including details about a violent night that changed Sunny’s parents’ young lives forever. Told through Sunny’s first-person narration, Sambury’s latest taps into the skin-prickling discomfort of a slasher film to explore the heavy inheritance of generational trauma. Identity, the intersection of race and privilege, and the nuances of class are handled with care, though the rules governing the supernatural elements are not fully explained.

A creepily potent story of a family legacy that gives terrifying shape to monsters real and imagined.