Seventeen-year-old Winnie Flynn, a closet horror fan with a starkly realistic worldview, has never known her mom's sister, Maggie: a high-profile reality TV producer. But in the wake of her mother's suicide, Winnie is recruited by Maggie to spend a summer in New Jersey, working as a production assistant on her current hit: Fantastic, Fearsome. At first Winnie figures that she has nothing to lose; her father has checked out, and Maggie is the only family she has left. But things get increasingly weird on set as Winnie is drawn into a world of paranormal believers and non-believers alike. Soon she learns a paranormal ability of her own: she can psychically detect lies. The things she discovers threaten her plan to stay under the radar, and may provide clues to her mother's death.

Told as an ongoing letter to a friend, with illustrations that offer clues throughout, Winnie's story is both a heartrending mystery and a pop culture critique in the vein of Libba Bray's Going Bovine and Beauty Queens—supplemented with illustrations throughout that recall the quirky, dark, and distinct aesthetics of Ransom Riggs's Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.