Loved New Girl in Town by Elle Gray for its vindictive small-town secrets? Let Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt deliver that same cold-served reckoning.

If you devoured the vindictive undercurrents and claustrophobic betrayals in New Girl in Town, then the quiet rage simmering beneath Remarkably Bright Creatures' small-town veneer will satisfy that same hunger for secrets worth excavating. Shelby Van Pelt strips away coastal charm to expose grief-soaked grudges, moral compromises, and the petty territorial wars of aging outsiders navigating communities that never forget—and never forgive.

Here's the hook: an octopus becomes your most brutally honest narrator, dismantling human pretense with the same cynical precision you craved in Gray's world. No sanitized redemption—just flawed people colliding over decades-old lies.

This is escapism for readers who want their emotional unraveling served cold, unsentimental, and impossibly unputdownable.