Mary by Nat Cassidy

Nat Cassidy’s highly commercial, debut horror novel Mary: An Awakening of Terror, blends Midsommar with elements of American Psycho and a pinch of I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Harper's Bazaar 15 Best Books for Spooky Season USA Today 5 New Books This Week Book Riot Summer Scares (2022) CrimeReads Most Anticipated Crime Books 2022 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.

lovedddddd the writing because it has this beautifully horric nature, the body gore was top notch, and the themes in this book really resnoated with me but it dragged a lot. it also felt like it was messy and trying to do a lot. overall i end up with a lot of mixed feelings and emotions about this book because part of me was bored and part of me was entertained

The final 10% of this book were pretty good, the other 90% was like a party that's not great but not quite bad enough to make me want to leave. That probably sounds worst than it should, I didn't hate my time with the book I was just mildly bored, the writing wasn't bad but I didn't feel engaged or invested in anything happening.

Neutral 2.5 rounded up.

I liked the descriptions of the desert, and the beginning of the book. The end kind of fell off for me, I just don't know if I'm smart enough for this. Much of the last 1/3 went over my head. The afterward was great!

The real curse of womanhood is that we never get to forget we have a body.

3.5 stars - this was distinctive, weird, and horrifying, and it weaves in the plight of the middle-aged, perimenopausal woman in a really artful way. Not quite a home run for me because it's a little long and meandering for a tale with basically no likable characters. (Note: this is not to say the characters are poorly drawn, or that we don't sympathize with them or even cheer them on at times. It's just that ultimately, I spent most of my time not rooting for anyone.)

After the prologue, I felt like I knew exactly what was going on, and got a little impatient with the middle of the story, like, “You already told us what the reveal will be - just reveal it already!” But even after the reveal there are some shocking and intriguing developments!

This is very disturbing and explicitly gory, with some passages suggestive of even worse (which we mercifully do not see come to fruition, but know has happened to people in the past). If you're looking for something merely creepy/ghostly, this is not it! But the violence serves the story and is effectively depicted.

All in all, this was a good read, and I very much appreciate the author doing something different and strange. I also think he wrote with remarkable sympathy and knowledge about living in a perimenopausal body! This was a cool theme to choose, and he used his research and consultations with women to good effect.