Dearest
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
A B&N Best Horror Book of 2024
A Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award Finalist
A Book of the Month Club Pick
A new mom in need of help opens her door to her long-estranged mother—only to invite something much darker inside—in this "fast-paced and frightening debut" (Rachel Harrison) about the long shadows cast by family secrets.
Flora is a new mom enamored of her baby girl, Iris, who has arrived a few weeks early. But with her husband still deployed, Flora must navigate the newborn stage alone. As the sleepless nights pass in the loneliness of their half-empty home, the edges of her reality begin to blur.
Just as Flora becomes convinced she is losing her mind, a surprising guest shows up to help: Flora’s own mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken in years. Can they mend their fraught relationship? Or is there more that Flora’s mother isn’t telling her about the events that led to their estrangement?
As stranger and scarier events unfold, Flora begins to fear that her mother’s secrets have allowed something truly evil to enter her home. She must decide: is her hold on reality slipping dangerously away? Or is she, in fact, the only thing standing between a terrifying visitor and her baby?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flora, the 32-year-old protagonist of screenwriter Walters's eerie if unsubtle debut, is sliding into postpartum psychosis six weeks after her daughter Iris's birth. Her military husband is deployed overseas and her father and stepmother have come and gone, leaving Flora alone, disgusted by her body, and aghast at her infant's demands. In despair, she reaches out to the mother she cut off four years earlier. Jodi is a critical, distant Mommie Dearest figure but ultimately responds to her child's cry for help—or so it seems at first. Walters writes effectively spooky descriptions and executes the plot twists competently. The thrills, however, are more developed than the emotional stakes, which prove difficult to buy into as Walters uncritically reinscribes the misogyny that her mother/night hag tropes rely upon—down to Flora's declaration, after 200-odd pages of her own dissociative terror and violent rages, that "I would have been happier with a mom who loved me fearlessly." She may be an unreliable narrator, but she certainly can say the quiet part out loud. Fans of true psychological horror will find this a little too on the nose.
