Maeve Fly by CJ Leede
PLEASE NOTE, THIS SUMMARY IS LESS SEXUALLY VIOLENT THAN THE ACTUAL BOOK.
Maeve Fly works in the happiest place in the world. One might think this makes her a joyful and delightfully kind human being. One would be wrong. Maeve believes that you don’t need a noble story to do what you want and you don’t have to be a victim to become a monster because life is meaningless. Maeve and her coworker, Kate, are the Ice Queen and Princess of one of the more popular animated princess movies of the past decade, and as they sit with children in their laps getting photos taken, Kate’s nose bleeds from a hangover and the kid in her lap is about to grab her boobs. Maeve is all for this tiny act of evil and debauchery, and the kid knows it.
Later, in the break room, other princesses, Cinderella and Snow White, are also there. Liz, the princess manager who isn’t a princess anymore because her boobs got way too big and voluptuous, comes in. Liz hates that she can’t be a princess anymore because of her great big boobs, and Maeve can’t stand her because she’s the most basic thing anyone in the world can be. A victim. Liz loves her job though, even though now she’s a fur character, but she just loves the park and everything it stands for. Liz starts to reprimand Maeve and Kate, but they just ignore her and talk about going to a party later, but Maeve doesn’t really want to go. Kate wants Maeve to meet her brother who just moved to town, and Maeve knows this, but she's been a bit preoccupied lately.
Maeve walks home later to the house she shares with her grandmother, Tallulah, who used to be a Hollywood starlet. She and her grandmother look almost exactly alike, and they’re alike in other ways, too, though not so much anymore because now, Tallulah is wasting away in a coma. Hilda, Tallulah’s nurse, has just gone home for the evening and Maeve spends some time remembering the first night she arrived to live with her grandmother after things went poorly with her parents. She remembers them sitting in a fancy restaurant and Tallulah asking her to look around and tell her what she sees. Humans trying too hard. Tallulah agrees. They are both wolves amongst the sheep. Now, though, Tallulah is dying, her cat, Lester the Cat, trying to get her attention though it does no good.
Before meeting up with Kate for the party, Maeve decides to put on a porno and watch a wolf hunting a rabbit on youtube and listen to Billie Holiday all simultaneously while also pleasuring herself. During this, she opens a social media app on her phone and, using a fake account that is pro-American, chats with one of her “friends.” Maeve, as Trixie Krueger, chats with Susan Parker about how much they hate illegals in their upper class neighborhoods and how they wish they could round them all up and burn them. When Susan suggests she thinks this is a good idea, Trixie hints that she’s a member of a group that is definitely the KKK without saying that and they would take care of those people if Susan wanted her to tell them to. She says she does. Maeve then screenshots their entire conversation and shares it on Reddit, immediately ruining Susan’s life.
Later, as Maeve travels to the party down the Sunset Strip that she is intimately familiar with, she encounters something new and different. A creepy fucking doll made by affixing a regular creepy doll’s head that is bald and missing an eyelid to the body of an alligator toy with blood and tied up with a strand of human hair. It’s perfect and terrifying. Maeve knows that someone who might be like her has left this thing and she doesn’t like it, but she is mesmerized by it and thinks it is going to somehow ruin her life. She continues thinking about it as she arrives at the party that’s in a strip club. Kate is there with a movie director and Gideon, her brother, a pro hockey player, who has just moved from New York. When Kate and the director sneak off to the bathroom, Kate trying desperately and in the best way she knows how to get her big break, Maeve fondly remembers the day they started their princess jobs and how they were both weird and a little creepy and not like anyone else in the room. She then has a semi-unsettling conversation with Gideon where she realizes he’s not a perfectly perfect golden boy like she thought he would be, and as they make eye contact, there’s an earthquake.
The next day, Maeve goes to work and walks in the hidden tunnels under the park, thinking about the dark secrets that lurk here that not many people know about. She loves it. When she arrives in the break room with some of the other princesses and Liz, Liz announces they have a new supervisor, Andre, and introduces him. Andre asks to speak with Maeve and Kate, and Maeve has a feeling that the bitchy princesses, Cinderella and Snow White, have complained about her and Kate and now they’re getting in trouble. Nope! Andre praises them and congratulates them on being raved about in Yelp reviews. He asks them about Liz, and Maeve says she does a good job, which surprises Kate, but then they leave and Kate makes a remark to Liz that insinuates that they know Liz is sleeping with Andre.
On her way home, Maeve thinks about the creepy fucking doll again, but it’s gone now, and then she remembers the first day she lived with her grandmother. They rode a tour bus around town, basically thinking they’re better than everyone else and that they can destroy any of the people they see if they want to. This is implied, of course, but Tallulah knew that she and Maeve were the same, so she decided to share the town with her granddaughter. Tallulah is not the same person she used to be now that she’s in a coma, but then Maeve gets a call from Kate about going to another party, so she reluctantly agrees to go.
This party is an engagement party and Kate has already gone off to sleep her way to the top with the director leaving Maeve on her own in a room full of strangers. Maeve gets stuck talking to a guy about how he met his girlfriend, a proctologist, which leads to Maeve being forced to watch videos the guy and his buddies share of them actively pooping. Luckily Gideon arrives then, giving Maeve the opportunity to pretend like she was about to show the poop video guy a video of her botched experimental cesarean and eating a placenta, which creeps the couple out enough for them to move on. Gideon immediately joins in on the joke and talks about eating placentas in lasagna and chili, but then there’s another earthquake and Maeve falls, drops a book she always has with her, and grabs onto Gideon’s junk for support. All she wants to do now is go back home by herself, target a new person on social media and watch porn and Beetlejuice, but Gideon wants to give her a ride. Maeve is pretty sure the creepy doll is responsible for the terrible things happening to her lately. Gideon hands Maeve her book back, and her phone, and then she accepts the ride from him, but he uses it to rile her up. He tells her they’re the same, she just doesn’t see it. Ha, no one is like her.
Maeve goes to her favorite bar later that is ever only inhabited by The Bartender, unnamed, and someone who might be Johnny Depp, but Maeve doesn’t know for sure. At this bar, which Maeve visits twice a week, every week, at the same time, every time, The Bartender always plays her favorite music, Halloween music, and there’s a jar of teeth on the counter. While drinking her usual, a pina colada, she thinks again of her grandmother after feeling unspeakable rage at being unable to put an egg in her asshole. (This happens in the book she loves and carries with her everywhere, and she realizes that Gideon might have seen her extensive notes on this very subject when he picked it up after the earthquake.) Tallulah saw Maeve filled with rage once after she threw a lamp at an actor and she sat her down and told her she could never let that rage be visible to anyone ever again. She has to learn to pretend. She has to be a wolf amongst the monkeys.
Maeve runs into Gideon again a little later after she leaves a standing date she keeps with an unnamed director who requires her to relieve herself into his mouth. Maeve is tired of having to do this with this director once a month and she thinks of stabbing him with a letter opener but decides against it. She stares out the window and sees Gideon swimming in a pool. Maeve and the director have breakfast out by the pool and Maeve wants to avoid Gideon, but of course he comes up to her. He seems to be at the pool with an actress, but all his attention is focused on Maeve, who he starts talking to about the egg predicament. So yes, he did read that in her book. He bought his own copy and tells her he thinks he’s figured it out and that they should try it because they should definitely have sex with each other. Maeve disagrees, but is intrigued at his egg thoughts.
When Maeve returns home, she finds that Hilda is still at the house. Hilda tells Maeve that it’s time to let her grandmother die, but Maeve is in denial. She doesn’t want her grandmother to die so, before letting Hilda call the doctor and begin the process of removing Tallulah from her life support, she asks her for help getting something out of the cellar. No one is supposed to go to the cellar, but they do. When they arrive, Hilda is terrified of what she sees there, which turns out to be lots of murder weapons and several bodies, but she’s not scared for long. Maeve grabs a prop mace from the wall and smashes it into Hilda’s skull. Maeve then begins the long and arduous process of hacking the body up and then stripping the flesh from her bones, which she does using chemicals and a slow cooker. After she’s done, she hangs the bones up around the house as Halloween decorations, then finishes the rest of the decorating using non-human accessories, like spiderwebs and twinkle lights. This is Maeve’s third kill.
While she’s decorating, two police officers stop by. They learned that Maeve called the hospice company and told them Hilda never made it to work that day, so they’ve come to check. They admire Maeve’s decorations and she tells them that hopefully Hilda will show up for work the next day and she’ll call them if she does. Instead, she calls the hospice agency and tells them she’s switched to another agency… which she has not. They agree to send Maeve all the pertinent information that she can then pass on to the other agency about Tallulah’s treatments, which now Maeve will take on on her own.
Maeve is pretty stressed for a little while and can only think about Hilda telling her it’s time for her grandmother to die, so she needs a distraction. She checks on Susan Parker who has been completely eviscerated online, good, and then decides to call Kate. In her phone, she sees a new contact, KATE’S HOT BROTHER… but she didn’t put that in there. Ugh, Gideon. But wait… he could be a great distraction. When she calls, he sounds out of breath, which she assumes is because he’s doing athlete bro type things, but she still decides to accept his sexual offer. Unfortunately, a little bit later, Maeve finds Lester the Cat in a puddle of blood. It seems, after freaking out and taking him to the vet, that Lester the Cat ate one of Hilda’s finger bones. He has to have surgery, but the vet assures Maeve everything will be fine and she even gets to keep the finger!
Kate comes to pick Maeve up later and they go watch Gideon in a practice hockey session which ends with Gideon getting punched in the face and beating up a bunch of other bros. It’s very enticing to Maeve. After practice, Kate gets the call of her lifetime. While she’s away talking about the new movie she’s been cast in, a real one, not an indie or a B movie, Gideon and Maeve talk. They’re both pretty upset at what they know Kate has done and will continue to do to maintain this role, and after she leaves to be with Director Derek, Gideon takes Maeve out on the ice. He wants her to let loose her rage that he knows dwells within her on a hockey puck, which she does, and then they have sex right then and there on the ice. It ends with Maeve reaching into Gideon's mouth and pulling out the tooth that was knocked loose during his earlier fight. He doesn’t seem to mind at all.
Maeve goes to her bar with The Bartender and Johnny Depp a few days later, still delightfully sore from her icecapades with Gideon. She’s fretting over treating her grandmother and feels as though she has violated her. She messed up her feeding tube and had to call a hospital for help. Things aren’t going so well but at least Tallulah is still alive. While drinking her pina coladas, Maeve gets a text from Gideon inviting her to a rematch, which she accepts. Then she feels someone watching her and turns to find a new creepy fucking doll, this one made with a squirrel toy body and human fingernails as teeth in the doll head’s mouth, again tied up with human hair and glued with blood, and she loves it. She asks The Bartender who else has been there, but he doesn’t answer.
Maeve meets up with Gideon at a bar. She sees an advertisement for a band that will be playing soon that uses an image of her grandmother for their poster, which makes Maeve crazy with anger, but then the sexy bartender keeps looking at her and Gideon while mixing drinks and Maeve gets an idea for later. For now, she tells Gideon the story of Jack of the Lantern that includes a deal with the devil and is how jack-o’-lanterns came to be. Maeve seriously loves Halloween, because that’s the one night where people truly embrace the darkness. Later, drunk, Maeve, Gideon and the bartender go back to Gideon’s house. The evening is full of sexual torture for the bartender, which doesn’t faze Gideon at all, and ends with Maeve, Gideon, and the eggs, soft boiled, in a room full of creepy Halloween decorations.
Time passes and Maeve struggles with caring for Tallulah, but she also enjoys all the Halloween decorations and music and being with Gideon and the countless people they have sex with in many random places including the secret tunnels under the theme park. One night, they have sex in a cemetery and he tells her he loves living here. Maeve also goes to the mall with Kate and remembers times when she thought that Kate actually saw who she was, deep down, a devouring wolf, and remained her friend. While they’re at the mall, it seems like a girl is watching them, but Kate ignores it. She also ignores the fact that Maeve can definitely see all the bruises all over her from Derek. She even ignores the woman who trips scooting around them on the escalator, her skirt and hair getting caught in the mechanism and ripping from her body. They go buy sheets.
After they part ways, Maeve sees the girl who was following them earlier and it seems she’s still following Maeve. Maeve takes off running after her and spots another creepy fucking doll along the way. She loses the girl in the chase but knows for certain she is the person leaving the dolls. The most recent one has two heads and a monkey body. Luckily, as she stands there freaking out a little bit, Gideon calls. They get together and have lots of sex in the Halloween torture room. As they lie together, Gideon tells Maeve that she’s not alone, and if only for this moment, she believes him.
Maeve wakes really late and really hungover the next day to a ton of missed alarms, calls and texts. Her grandmother has missed medication doses, so she rushes home to try to take care of her. She's still alive but has bedsores and Maeve feels terrible about it. She texts Liz that she's very ill and won't be in, then decides she's got to get her priorities back in order. She texts Kate an apology and texts Gideon that what they're doing is a mistake and to not contact her or try to get her to change her mind.
Maeve goes to work early the next day with plans to apologize but is fired instead. Liz followed her and Gideon the night that they had sex in the tunnels and recorded it. Liz fires her in a really unprofessional way and Andre is there with her and they're obviously in a relationship. He disapproves of how Liz is handling things, but doesn't do anything to stop her. She tries to fire Kate as well, but then she quits instead. She's a big time movie actress now after all. After they leave, Kate asks Maeve if she missed work because she was with Gideon and she says she was but she's ended things with him now because he’s too good for her. Kate just bumps Maeve's shoulder and leaves. Maeve has a feeling that their relationship is irreparably damaged.
Maeve goes back home and sits with her grandmother. She hopes Gideon will contact her but he doesn't. She finally speaks to her grandmother for the first time since she fell ill and basically begs her to come back because she needs her, but she's not going to. Maeve then loses her shit even more than usual. She goes to her room, screaming and crying. She used to look to books for comfort and knowledge but now she throws them from her bookshelf until one catches her eye and inspires her: American Psycho.
Maeve drives to the theme park for its Halloween event that is full of villains, but she goes dressed as Cinderella having snuck in and stolen her dress. She finds Liz and Andre walking around, all in love in their matching mouse ear headbands, and follows them. She also encounters a little girl dressed as a mermaid and tells her the true little mermaid story that ends in violent death. Then she sees Susan Parker, life totally not ruined at all. She hates it, but she has more important things to do right now. She finds Liz and Andre again and follows them out to the parking lot. They seem to be drunk or at least unwell, so Maeve offers to drive them home. Along the way, she tells them that she drugged the food in the breakroom, which they've clearly eaten.
Maeve drives Liz and Andre to her house and leaves them in the garage while she goes inside and cares for Tallulah and Lester the Cat. She comes back, intending to take them down to the cellar but Andre is too heavy, so she slits his throat, paints herself in his blood and steals his mouse ears. She then cuts his real ears off and attaches them to the headband, of course. After, she carries Liz down to the cellar and places her there amongst the bones of the others there so she'll see them first whenever she wakes up. Maeve bought several things earlier in the day including some new zip ties, hooks, a pipe, caulk, acid, a wrench, pliers and some mice, and now that Liz has woken, she’s going to use them. Gideon calls which fuels her rage even more. She shatters her phone then she gives a very dramatic speech about how she and Liz could have been friends. Finally, singing the iconic song for her iconic Ice Queen, Maeve shoves an acidic pipe with a mouse in it into Liz’s… personal space.
After cutting up and cooking down body parts, Maeve goes to visit her grandmother. She remembers the time, after Tallulah ate her daily breakfast of four almonds and a piece of dark chocolate, that she took her down to show her what was in the cellar. Maeve then goes out to hide and wait for the girl who is leaving the dolls. She attempts to lure her by finding one and smashing it, which makes her sick. The girl, who looks a lot like Maeve, finds the broken doll and then Maeve springs and runs after her, but she gets away. As she prowls back home, she sees the band advertisement using Tallulah’s image. The band is playing… right now.
Later, in the band’s tour bus, listening to one of her favorite Hallloween-themed songs, Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, on repeat, Maeve kills every member of the band in gruesome ways: drumsticks in ears, ripping off the jaw of the singer, breaking fingers, biting off tongues, peeling off skin, hacking up penises like hot dogs… When she’s done and covered in blood, she takes some brain matter from each band member and drops it into several drinks as she walks through the bar. No one questions the fact that she’s covered blood as it’s almost Halloween.
Instead of going home, Maeve barhops. She sees an advertisement on tv for the biggest Halloween party of the year, then checks social media and sees that Gideon and Kate, the hottest brother sister duo everyone is talking about, are supposed to be there. There is speculation as to who Gideon will be taking as his date. The girl he was supposedly seeing, the girl from the pool, hasn’t been seen since, so maybe he’s going to go with a model! Maeve is furious. She then goes to her favorite bar. No one else is there as it’s just after sunrise, but it’s still open and it’s just The Bartender and Johnny as always, which is very interesting. Maeve drops a handful of teeth into the teeth jar and then has sex with Johnny Depp while he looks at himself smolderingly in the mirror.
When she gets home later, Maeve plans to get dressed up for the Halloween party, find the doll-placing girl, end that, and get her grandmother dressed up since it’s their favorite day. Unfortunately, Tallulah is dead. But Tallulah can never be dead. Maeve feels her presence inside herself, gets them both dressed up beautifully and goes to eat dinner at their favorite restaurant. Maeve’s inner wolf howls and Tallulah’s howls and Maeve plans on doing terrible things.
Maeve dresses in her grandmother’s famous outfit from that famous picture, a dead playboy bunny, and goes to the party looking for Gideon and Kate. Tallulah is inside her and they twirl and writhe at the party. She dances with Pennywise and Hannibal Lector and Leatherface and Patrick Bateman and the Joker and Jack Torrance and Michael and Jason and Freddy and Jigsaw. Eventually, she sees Kate dressed as Linda Blair from The Exorcist and Director Derek as her priest. Kate goes outside and Derek gets a drink from the bar and begins to follow her, but Maeve catches him drugging her drink and secretly swaps them. She asks him to meet her in the bathroom and he agrees.
Maeve gives Derek more roofies and sexually zip ties him to a toilet. After telling him that he’s made a mistake drugging and abusing Kate, she scoops out his eyeball with a cocaine spoon he wears around his neck. She doesn’t want to kill Derek so Kate can still have her movie and get everything she wants, so she tells him that if he ever tells anyone what she did, no one will believe him.
Outside the bathroom, Maeve runs into Kate who is pissed. She said everyone saw Maeve making out with Derek and taking him into the bathroom. Maeve is confused. She’d never hurt Kate like that, but Kate won’t listen to her as she tries to explain. Kate then basically tells Maeve she’s pathetic and she’s always going to be alone and she’s going to wither and die just like her grandmother and that she wants her to stay out of her life forever. After several stunned moments alone on the dance floor, Derek must wake up because everyone’s screaming to call 911. While everyone is frantic, Maeve spots Gideon across the way and he’s not panicked at all. They go back to Maeve’s house.
After hours and hours of sex all over the house, they talk. Gideon is happy to be in LA and to be with Maeve. They order food and he tells her he has something to show her, which he will after they eat. When Maeve goes to the door to retrieve their delivered meal, she is greeted instead by the police, the same ones who visited her after she killed Hilda. They’re just checking in, but they are super impressed by her decorations, which, remember, are actually Hilda’s bones. They tell Maeve that Hilda has gone missing and then ask if Maeve will decorate for them next Halloween. The food finally arrives and Maeve plans to take it to Gideon and then they’ll eat and have lots more sex, but she can’t find him. Then she notices the cellar door is open.
Maeve remembers going into the cellar with Tallulah for the first time. Tallulah explains that Maeve should never let anyone into the cellar, should never let anyone inside, because no one will ever truly understand her. She is a wolf and a wolf can only ever be a wolf. Tallulah then introduces Maeve to the bones of her grandfather. Gideon stands in the cellar now, taking in all the bones and bodies that have stacked up there over the years. Maeve thinks he won’t understand. He starts to say that he suspected something about her, but she doesn’t listen. He tries to show her what he brought to her, but she won’t let him. He says he’s not upset, but she doesn’t believe. He says, Maeve, me too, but she ignores him. She hits him with the mace again and again until he is silent.
After she cleans up, Maeve takes Gideon’s clothes up to her room. Inside his pocket, she finds an envelope full of photographs. Photographs of dead bodies. Maeve, me too. Maeve drives to Gideon’s house and finds a locked room. Inside it is a body and all sorts of creepy fucking doll parts. There’s also a completed doll. One with a wolf body and fly wings and a jack-o’-lantern and a little note that says I See You. Maeve is beside herself. She didn’t listen. She didn’t hear him when he told her he was like her. And now, here she is, alone.