TL;DR: Hysterical is a sweaty, coke-dusted NYC spiral that starts as sex-work survival math and ends as a love story told with knives, teeth, and a devotional level of bad decisions. It’s viciously readable, often funny in that “oh god, I should not be laughing” way, and it lands hardest when it treats obsession like a religion you keep feeding until it feeds back.

Amber Dean is originally from New York and now lives in Abu Dhabi with her family and rescue animals; Hysterical is her first novel, with a second in progress.

Our POV is Jessie, a young woman trying to build a “safe” life in 2013 New York while escorting, partying, and clinging to control like it’s oxygen. She gets pulled into a glossy orbit of money and curated masculinity through Mr. Wall Street, and into something far more dangerous through Tinsel, a friend-shaped black hole of charisma. Jessie wants to be chosen, kept, adored, and she will do absolutely deranged shit to make that happen, especially once blood becomes part of the plan.

The book’s secret weapon is how it weaponizes longing. Jessie’s not just “unreliable,” she’s strategic about the stories she tells herself, and that makes the descent feel like watching someone tighten their own tourniquet and call it self-care. When the violence escalates, it’s not random splatter. It’s ritual. A table set for two. A body turned into proof. A domestic fantasy pushed past the cliff edge until it’s chewing on you. The late-game commitment to that idea is genuinely jaw-dropping, in the literal “holy shit” sense.

Dean writes in clean, fast, confessional blades. The sentences are glossy when Jessie is performing “girlhood” and clipped when she’s hunting clarity. The book is great at the texture of nightlife: the curated outfits, the humiliations, the hunger hiding under banter, the way men talk like HR complaints are a personality. And when it goes full nightmare, it stays oddly precise, like the narrator is cataloging a crime scene to keep from feeling it. That steadiness makes the book hard to put down, even when you want to take the moral equivalent of a shower.

This is a novel about desire as captivity. Jessie keeps trying to trade herself for safety, then trades safety for intensity, and then intensity for… permanence. Underneath the gore, the horror engine is the belief that love can be earned through enough performance, enough sacrifice, enough making-yourself-small. The aftertaste is rancid and sad: the question of what happens when the only “tenderness” you’ve ever trusted is possession, and the only way you can imagine keeping someone is to make them still.

As a debut, this is impressively confident: it marries transgressive downtown-goth energy to true-crime cultural static, then twists it into a critique of how women are taught to survive by being consumable. It’s not the most elegant book you’ll read this year, but it’s one you’ll remember, partly because it has the guts (sometimes literally) to follow its thesis all the way to the cops-at-the-door endpoint.

A sharp, nasty, darkly magnetic obsession spiral that sticks the landing by refusing to blink first, even when it gets fucking grotesque.

Hysterical by Amber Dean,
published December 15, 2025.