Motherhood is joyful, rewarding, magical and, let's be honest, a horror show. Writers, some of them mothers, have transformed the dread, chaos, revulsion and unrelenting demands of mothering children into some frighteningly fabulous fiction.
Chicago author Julia Fine transforms postpartum depression into a ghost story, with a nod to children's literature, in this novel described as "Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening."
Love The Bad Seed? Check out Zoje' Stage's evil child thriller. Hanna is the apple of her father's eye and the bane of her mother's existence. Suzette is at her wit's end battling chronic illness and trying to be a good mother to selectively mute 7-year-old Hanna, whose malevolence runs deep. The age-old anxiety of mothering a difficult child makes for great psychological horror.
In this gothic horror novel, with echoes of Rosemary's Baby and Salem's Lot, a young couple trying to recover from a the complicated, traumatic birth of their first child. Through a lottery, they secure an apartment in a desirable building in NYC, but their good luck is short lived as a nightmare begins to unfold in this terrifying story featuring a vampire theme rooted in Jewish folklore. Cassidy is a critically acclaimed author who excels in gore so readers beware.
In this classic, which was adapted for film by Roman Polanski, a newly married Guy and Rosemary move into a fabulous new apartment in NYC and befriend their neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet. After becoming pregnant and having a number of disturbing hallucinations, Rosemary becomes suspicious of her eccentric neighbors, and then of her husband is this chilling, canonical work of horror with themes of women's subjugation, isolation, paranoia and the occult.
Molly, an exhausted palaeobotanist and mother of two young children, hears loud noises in her home and chalks it up to sleep deprivation until she finds herself face to face with a masked intruder in this genre-bending, ambitious, and, surprisingly, darkly comic thriller.
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