Marion arrives on Sawkill Rock still raw from her father's death, moving in with her mother and her sister, Charlotte. The island trades on that kind of beauty: horse farms roll down to black cliffs, and the sea keeps beating at the shore below. It has also been losing girls for years, one by one, and nobody on Sawkill talks about where they went.
Marion falls for Val Mortimer, the richest and most watched girl on the island, whose family's fortune reaches back further than the Mortimers will say. Zoey starts to suspect that her own father is not the man he seems to be. Marion, meanwhile, begins seeing things she cannot explain and cannot make anyone else believe.
As another girl goes missing, the three converge on what the island has been hiding. Something the locals call the Collector has fed on Sawkill's daughters for generations. The Mortimer family has paid it in bodies for years, to keep its land and its fortune. Marion, Val and Zoey are left to decide how far they will go to stop it.
Sawkill Girls is a standalone young adult horror novel, first published in 2018. It was a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award and the Lambda Literary Award. The dread builds slowly before it turns violent, and the bond between Marion and Val is as central to the story as the monster is.