This was fucking WILD. Headlights hooked me with one of the most disturbing premises I’ve read in a while and somehow just kept getting stranger from there. It’s gruesome, emotional, supernatural, and completely unpredictable. I genuinely had no idea where C.J. Leede was taking me for most of this book, and I mean that as the biggest compliment.

Daniel is supposed to be done with the FBI when one last case drags him back to Denver and into something he’s spent years trying to escape. People are waking up alongside highways with no memory of what happened to them, except they’re wearing the skin of people they apparently murdered. And somehow, that isn't even the weirdest part.

I loved how this started with the bones of a serial-killer investigation and slowly allowed something much darker and stranger to creep into it. There’s this constant question of how much can actually be explained and how much Daniel has spent his entire life refusing to understand. The deeper he gets into the case, the more his investigation and his own past start bleeding together.

And this book is dark. The imagery surrounding these murders is genuinely horrific, but the gore never felt like the only thing the book had going for it. Underneath all of it is a story about trauma, grief, fear, and what happens when you spend your life trying to outrun something that has never stopped following you. That emotional side was what really made the horror work for me.

I also loved the Colorado setting. The highways, snow, mountains, darkness, and isolation make everything feel huge and claustrophobic at the same time. Knowing the book deliberately draws from The Shining makes that atmosphere even better.

By the end, I was completely locked in. This was weird, violent, emotional, and way more ambitious than I expected it to be. Exactly the kind of horror that reminds me why I love this genre so much.