How to Hide Your Body After Death

Anahita Esther Blanding-Davani has always known she would die young.

The genetic illness that claimed her mother and brother runs through her veins like a curse, and at thirty-two, she can feel her body beginning its final surrender. After a violent confrontation with a man who has haunted her since girlhood, she flees her hometown in rural North Carolina, using her brother''s life insurance to buy a trailer in the middle of nowhere—a place to wait for the end, alone and unbothered.

But the woods behind her new home hold something ancient. Something hungry.

The entity that emerges from the darkness offers Anahita a deal: in exchange for her body after death, it will ease her suffering, consuming her pain through increasingly intimate touches. What begins as a transaction becomes something far more dangerous—tenderness, devotion, and a love that defies the boundary between human and other.

As Anahita''s body fails, she finds herself building an unexpected family: the creature who worships her dying flesh, and Dale, a young trans Native teen fleeing his own demons. Together, they forge a home in the liminal space between life and death, love and consumption, ending and beginning.

How to Hide Your Body After Death is a Southern Gothic that explores what it means to be truly seen, truly wanted, and truly devoured by love.