I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED, what a great title!

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED
EMILY ZINNIKAS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

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My Review: Willa's desire to bury her trauma, not make theater of it, is at the heart of this creepy, atmospheric story of dread. It's impossible to decouple one's existence as a survivor of an unsolved mass murder from the event but Willa's kept her profile as low as is possible.

The exigencies of storytelling make that impossible. Willa's goin' in. Not willingly, not graciously, but in she's going. Into the past, into reckoning with her...odd...beginnings, into what one hopes can be a laying-to-rest of the horrifying truths of childhood sexual assault.

It's the season for uneasy-making reads. Based on the synopsis I rather thought this story would be more about supernatural unease, dealing with hauntings and entities and so on. Instead it's about the awful reality that some kids are not safe even in their own beds. It's very uneasy-making but all too corporeal. I was surprised to feel so compelled to keep reading. It's not exciting writing on a sentence level but it kept my eyes engaged for an entire day, difficult to achieve at this late date in my reading career, as Willa's return to the site of her trauma brings her sporadically, almost haphazardly, into contact with her unresolved pain. Normally I would be complaining that was disorganized, or lacked narrative thrust. Instead of feeling that intellectual response I felt it was me being in Willa's fragmented, damaged emotions with her, processing with her as she had to do and I was along to witness so I could stand in fellowship with her in her hours of need.

It was not the experience I'd expected to have in the read. It was in most ways a better, more real, more involving one. It was dark, and dangerous, and deliberately frightening at times; it was always Othering, intensely alienating to be with Willa in the recovered moments. They were not numerous or extended in ways that felt prurient to me-the-reader.

Horror that gets dressed in supernatural drag doesn't often work that well for me. I usually dismiss the supernatural elements, where this time I had a context for them that made them make sense to me. I won't recommend the read to all readers...check the CWs...and I suspect the truest devotees to horror reading won't get as much out of the read as I, with my self-supplied remapping of the story, did.

It was a successful, pleasurable read for me. I hope y'all will consider giving it a shot at your time and treasure.

QUEEN MAB, debut surreal mother-fiction

QUEEN MAB
EMILY McBRIDE
FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.

There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?

Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.

Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?

Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?

Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.

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My Review: I speak from experience when I say psychosis is terrifying to experience. I do not wish it on the very lowest, worst human beings on the planet.

Not even MAGAts. Besides, most of 'em are already there.

Queen Mab is probably the best fictional evocation I've ever read as to *why* psychosis is utterly terrifying. Something Madeleine lnows cannot be true...is true. Everything she is, has learned, made her own mental world with, tells her this hideous impossibility: her child is a faery changeling. It is simply the truth.

What ensues is the other horrifying reality of psychosis: to get back to consensus reality means admitting you've left it, and that is a terrible, terrible moment in a person's life. It does not help that her career is the study of Victorian literature. Irish folklore. Made-up stuff that's now horrifyingly real in her brain, and she has to tell the people in her life that this is where she is. And she has to grapple with, not only having given birth, something her mother could not do and did not do so has no insights to offer but now Madeleine has to re-grapple with her status as an adoptee. Is this congenital? Is there something permanent wrong?

I'm well-known for not being in the Cult of Mother. Madeleine is probably burning her membership card. But a story like this one that carefully flenses the bullshit rainbows-and-lollipops stuff off the bones of the life-altering disaster-movie destruction of pregnancy, delivery, neonatal care, social rearrangement, marital instability...and all without making the process feel artificially predetermined....

It's quite a feat. It's a first novel so it can go over the top at times. It can seemingly forget where it's been to go where the author wants it to go. But it never fails to ground itself in Madeleine's world as she sees it at thee moment. It makes for a deep, unnerving reading experience. Madeleine's fear is we-the-reader's fear.

I'm very impressed. I'm intrigued by what Author McBride will create next.

WHAT HUNGER, weirdly satisfying and thoroughly revolting at the same time

WHAT HUNGER
CATHERINE DANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nyugen, as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood, for fans of Jennifer’s Body and Little Fires Everywhere.

It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.

Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.

But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny’s Vietnamese lineage and her mother’s emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

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My Review: Adolescence is a time of Certainty covering terrified confusion, Outrage covering terrified hurt. The cultural Western headiness of slobbering pandering laser-focused attention on the adolescent, a malleable consumer/believer in the making, from all sides ignites the fuel into a solar-intensity conflagration of perspectiveless conviction that, unless *I* like/love/want it, it's a Plot to Ruin My Life.

I get lots of criticism for using Capital Letters in my writing. Here it's done, as it most often is, to highlight an emotional not a rational response evoked or intended by the author (me or other) to be evoked. Perspective needs to be earned and learned the hard way, so this is all perfectly understandable. It's also why so many of us can not stand coming-of-age stories, to the point where I recommend them to those most intensely averse to them in order to watch their manners pumps explode with the effort to say no without screaming at me. (Hiya Kath!)

In this story Ronny's ready-to-ignite rage goes critical in several incidents. The response to that criticality is, in keeping with the title, related to food choices...not unusual for adolescent females, but decidedly NOT the usual eating-disorder narrative I'm heartily sick of reading. It is if anything an inverted use of eating disorders I'm accustomed to. I've known no anthropophagic beings. Plenty of bulimics and anorexics.

What Hunger is a hilariously apt, darkly funny title for a deeply, darkly, eucharistically furious story. It's metaphor gone clear, in scientological jargon, and exteriorized. (Y'all, stick to Wikipedia to look up scientology stuff. DO NOT USE CHAT OR GOOGLE. The consequences are dire.) I'm not always interested in body horror used to explain rage, but this story worked the alchemy I need to get invested in the action. It was indeed gross at times.

Balancing that, and creating what felt to me an exquisite tension, was Ronny's family history of expressing love through gorgeously evoked meals that I damn near passed out from drooling myself into dehydration while reading. What a food vocabulary Author Dang has! It's a pleasure to read someone's upsetting writing when it then soothes me with food.

I'm easy. You might not be.

The most notable dissatisfaction I have is the pacing of the story after Ronny's, um, conversion? discovery? whatever, big change. Action slows to allow for introspection for quite a stretch, and it did not get back to work soon enough for this reader. There are developments that, in their absence of a world-building framework, just sorta...happen...which very seldom works out best for the narrative cohesion or character development. I mean, "ewwwww" is okay if it effloresces out of some Lovecraftian something, not so much done here.

The complexity of the family's internal dynamics are the source of the extra half-star on the three and a half I was planning to award this very good but not outstanding tale. Ronny, like any adolescent, is still molding her responses around her family. She, like the most bearable adolescents I've ever known, is adaptable in her responses still, not hardening into adamant certainty. She has a very touching relationship with her mother and her auntie, both still morphing as she develops.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy the horror bits, or want to experience them getting the good relationship development, but if your stomach is strong this is a contender for your summer reading.

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, trauma victim’s voyage of discovery

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET
Simon & Schuster
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Scarface meets Moby-Dick in this groundbreaking, darkly comic novel about a young man’s attempt to capitalize on his mother’s murky legacy—a story steeped in Miami’s marvelous and sinister magic.

Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull’s legal team and living in his aunt’s garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.

When Izzy’s efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are—permeating everything from Miami’s sinking streets to Izzy’s memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy’s story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana’s claws, and as menacing as a killer whale’s teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy’s boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, Say Hello to My Little Friend is Jennine Capó Crucet’s most daring, heart-breaking, and fearless book yet.

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My Review: Izzy is as average a guy as you will ever find. He has a crazy-ass inner life which suggests to him that making a living as a Pitbull impersonator:

...so we have a visual lock on Izzy from the off. Though, speaking of "off," the novel opens with Izzy getting his life rearranged by a lawyerly letter telling him to cease-and-desist with the Pitbull-y stuff. Now he has to figure out a way to make a living, and a life. Where is his family, you ask. Nowhere. He’s got none.

That central reality, that lack of mooring chains, allows Izzy to follow his inner voice’s promptings to do the absolute most batshit-crazy nonsense...remember he *was* a Pitbull impersonator until forced not to be...like, oh, let’s say, model the entire rest of his life on the character in the film Scarface.

Follow the links, notice the patterns...this is not random pop-cultural detritus the author has randomly picked up.

Then comes the plot twist Lolita the Orca. How in the name of all that is holy did an ORCA show up in a novel about a Cuban-American man’s identity crisis?!

You really need to follow those links. Do some surface-scratching into the culture not already familiar to you. The word "reggaeton" will enter your vocabulary painlessly this way, and you will need it and the ideas it fronts for to wedge into your brain. The world is changing, and unless you intend to try to stop it by joining the banners and deniers on the radical right, you had best expend some brainergy getting convesrant with Izzy and his world.

Do it painlessly by reading this novel. Moby-Dick was nowhere near this much fun to read, and Izzy beats Ishmael all hollow as a cicerone through all things whale-y. The resonances with the culture of the past make the culture of this century accessible for us midcentury moderns. The read is fun, it’s fast, it’s trenchant...it’s saying a lot more than the words mean.

Isn’t that more or less a novel’s brief? This one does make you work. It requires some effort to get the pop-cultural zeitgeist. It does not pretend to be all about you and center your experience. That novel exists in droves, elsewhere. THIS novel takes you inside the head of a man so traumatized by his past that he can not afford to go deep into anything. This novel parses the cost of cheap thrills and entertainment. The plot, the spine, is the voyage of discovery that we take with Izzy. Like any voyage of discovery, it is not a straight line from start to finish, so douse that expectation right away. Go on the trip as Author Crucet planned it and it will reward you with knowledge and information about the world of a trauma survivor. That can only be a net gain to your own world, because you are statistically likely to know a trauma survivor.

You might not know it yet, but you could easily pick up on signs you would not have seen before if you get your hooks into this story and its meanings.

POOR DEER, second novel by Claire Oshetsky of CHOUETTE fame

POOR DEER
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco(Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.

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My Review: What dies when a child dies? A parent dies thousands of deaths while their child is alive: fear, worry, the desperate pride in the pain that they suffer because of the child’s process of individuation from the Terrible Twos to *shudder* adolescence, or the death of a thousand cuts as I describe it; the death of the child is, however, the absence of these once-suffered pains, now become the hideous trackless void of grief. Many, maybe most, suffering parents turn to some sort of formal ritualized observance. The difference is of kind, not sort. Whether they choose religious, or secular, fellowship they seek comfort based in groups that cater for the vast needs of those grieving. But the dead child’s peers, lacking the perspective of adults, do not have the same outlets for their intense and passionate feelings.

Margaret, after the death of her best friend and neighbor Ruby, has developed versions of many of these coping behaviors: chanting, counting, seeking and seeing omens. Her mother makes the error common to many parents of her station and low educational attainment, using threats and bullying to keep Margaret in line. The result is predictable to the reader.

Margaret uses fantasy to put her feelings into tolerable emotional perspective. Her world is made up of adults who strive...I’d say "struggle" but they would never agree to such a freighted negative term...just to make some semblance of a life. Thus they, and Margaret, are always under tremendous stresses from many angles. The usual suspect for their adult coping mechanism in this kind of toxic soup is some religious and/or spiritual system, either mainstream or off the beaten path. Margaret’s mother and aunt, with whom she lives in their childhood home, are of the very old-fashioned Old Testament christian believers ilk. Her own coping mechanism is, as expected, in alignment with that kind of belief system, though its substance is not christian looking.

Given all the above, it makes sense that Margaret makes her grief, guilt...what religious system works without guilt?...and shame into an entity that judges and abuses her. That it was Poor Deer, an animal spirit named with the often overheard characterization of Margaret that she reimagines, was inspired. Different in affect, the same in effect. All of it was hard for my similarly afflicted self to read. Did Margaret cause her best friend Ruby’s death? contribute to it? or is Margaret simply a child whose always turbulent emotional world has been completely upended by a tragedy she has no framework to process, to get any kind of handle on? Since we meet Margaret and Poor Deer, that animal spirit aforementioned, as the latter has finally bullied the former into writing a confession of her guilt...for what? I wondered what can a child really be held resonsible for?...we are never on solid narrative ground.

I contend we never get there. This is, for me as a reader, a feature not a bug.

Margaret is an unusually bright person. Her coping mechanisms all fill the places that more intelligent, more emotionally adept parent figures...no father anywhere to be seen...would have resulted in her finding a direction forward into her life, instead of circling endlessly the disfiguring self-doubt and suspicion she swims through daily. Margaret creates, or finds, or discovers Poor Deer to fulfil the role of cicerone, mentor, and conscience.

Poor Deer is a story. All of us live out stories. Margaret has built her own world of stories because she can control them, can make sense of them, can mold them into the kind of purposeful, positive paths that she has so sorely lacked. So is this a story about how awful a childhood this one girl has led? Are we expected to follow this path from tragedy to mental illness then just...go on about our day?

If you haven’t read Chouette, you might wonder. Author Claire does not Do pointless suffering. Suffering you will do. There is, in fact, a Point. That we come to the end of the story in a manner not wholly predictable is just the expected way Author Claire works. That we come to the end of Margaret’s childhood without the sense of being smothered in a bow tied around our readerly eyes as we face the firing squad of Predictability’s story soldiers is vintage Author Claire.

Does childhood end? Do we wake up one fine day all adulty and fully prepared for life? Are you kidding? Margaret doesn’t do that either, she slugs it out with demons internal and external, and Margaret...becomes Margaret. You are investing in the journey into selfhood of a person who survives her life and becomes herself. It is a journey that never, ever grows less important or less lonely. Going with Margaret, whose beginnings reminded me a great deal of my own, on her trip through the story she and Poor Deer massage into ever evolving shapes and sizes as needed, left me very rough at the end of the book.

The spots I have polished into a high gloss by reinventing the stories I needed to survive got sanded down to the original story. Like Margaret, I didn’t grow up, I grew larger by reinvention. That process, once begun in survival mode, does not...can not...end.

All five stars.