Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy is a 405 page novel published by Tor Nightfire in 2022.
Genre: Horror
Opening Line:
There’s a corpse in the bathtub.
Synopsis:
Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.
But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.
Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.
Then the killings begin again.
Mary’s definitely going to find herself.
My Thoughts:
“Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.”
Holy moly, this book is bananas, but in the best way!
Normally I much prefer spooky supernatural horror to gory horror, but although this book is capital G Gruesome, there is so much more to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like it!
Mary is coming up on her fiftieth birthday and she’s not doing so great. Twice in this book she visits a male doctor and tells them each about the insomnia, the panic attacks–she even tells one of them the full truth, that she can’t look into a mirror without seeing her face in the reflection bubble up and burst in putrefication. Both doctors respond with, “And when was your last period?”
Due to an unfortunate series of events, Mary finds herself making the trip back to the isolated desert town she was born in, the town that was terrorized by a serial killer until he was killed by police nearly fifty years before. And then the killings start again.
You might like this book if you like unreliable narrators, vengeful spirits, true crime podcasts, and cults. You might like this book if you like your horror with a side of the absurd to surprise a laugh out of you now and then. You might like this book if you’re familiar with the nightmare that is perimenopause. You might like this book if you cheered when Neville Longbottom finally stood up for himself, but even moreso if your response to Stephen King’s Carrie was, “Good for her.”
Just bear in mind there is a whole lot of grisly subject matter here. If, like me, you’re able to look past that to all the amazing things about this story, then buckle in and get ready for one wild ride!
This book includes no steamy content, but all of the explicit on-page violence.
Jessica Crawford 