Tantrum
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this electric horror novel from the author of The Insatiable Volt Sisters, an exhausted mother thinks her newborn might be a monster. She’s right.
Thea’s third pregnancy was her easiest. She wasn’t consumed with anxiety about the baby. She wasn’t convinced it was going to be born green, or have a third eye, or have tentacles sprouting from its torso. Thea was fine. Her baby would be fine.
But when the nurses handed Lucia to her, Thea just knew. Her baby girl was a monster. Not only was Lucia born with a full set of teeth and a devilish glint in her eye, but she’s always hungry. Indiscriminately so. One day Lucia pointed at her baby brother, looked Thea dead in the eye and said, “I eat.”
Thea doesn’t know whether to be terrified or proud of her rapacious baby girl. And as Lucia starts growing faster and talking more, dark memories bubble to the surface--flashes from Thea’s childhood that won’t release their hooks from her heart. Lucia wants to eat the world. Thea might just let her.
Crackling with originality and dark humor, Rachel Eve Moulton’s Tantrum is a provocative exploration of familial debt, duty, and the darker side of motherhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This heavy-handed horror novel from Moulton (The Insatiable Volt Sisters) introduces Thea, a deeply unhappy young mother who's anxious about her toddler daughter, Lucia, a child with an unnatural number of teeth and a malevolent aura. Convinced she's given birth to a monster, Thea frets about what to do even as her increasingly surreal struggle to parent Lucia awakens repressed memories of her own abusive childhood. The novel is at its most successful when it's tightly focused on Thea's personal struggles, but Moulton's prose unfortunately veers wildly from somewhat generic domestic drama into confusing, phantasmagoric dream sequences that provide harrowing imagery, but add little to the overarching plot. Similarly unsuccessful are the attempts to generalize Thea's experiences to make clunky statements about motherhood and gender. Thea herself makes for a deeply unpleasant narrator, with much of the novel's attempts at humor coming from her cruel one-liners, and the supporting cast is thinly sketched. It's a disappointment.
