The White Lotus meets The Haunting of Hill House in this propulsive horror about a woman who feels trapped by both her toxic family and the luxury vilThe White Lotus meets The Haunting of Hill House in this propulsive horror about a woman who feels trapped by both her toxic family and the luxury villa where they’re spending their Italian holiday.
Thirty-four year old Anna just wishes her family would leave her alone, but they seem to want nothing more than to jump at every opportunity to criticize her life choices and blame their problems on her. Anna has learned to ignore their prying questions and backhanded compliments, but when their annual family vacation comes around and she finds herself trapped in a Tuscan villa with the whole clan, she starts to suspect that the strange accidents happening all around her may by caused by a supernatural force.
As the ghosts haunting the house become more threatening and tensions mount between family members, Anna’s cool, self-possessed attitude begins to crack. Is there really something inherently wrong with her, as her siblings keep suggesting? Or is the sinister presence in the house awakening something that has long lain dormant within her?
Your opinion on this novel will largely hinge on how much you like the protagonist. Personally, I loved Anna; it’s been a long time since I’ve rooted so hard for a fictional character. I found her cool-headed aloofness refreshing, and her emotional maturity admirable. For once, it’s nice to read about a female protagonist who acts like an adult and isn’t chronically insecure about herself. Similarly, I thought that Thorne did a really good job making her family members viscerally obnoxious. Her siblings especially are awful in a painfully realistic way: they reminded me of people I’ve met in real life who can never take responsibility for their actions and need to dunk on others in order to feel better about themselves.
It was also very fun to read about the misadventures of a group of rich American tourists in Italy. Having worked with people like the Paces in the past, I felt a twinge of recognition every time their cluelessness and entitlement got them into trouble.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that this reads more like a psychological/family drama than a classic gothic horror. To me at least, the supernatural elements were the weakest part of the book. You figure out pretty early on what the deal with the house is, and the narrative tension revolves less around the ghost’s presence and more around Anna’s relationship with her family.
With that in mind, I would recommend this book to fans of the “unhinged women” subgenre who love to read about occultism, folklore, and toxic family dynamics....more
I should probably preface my review by saying that I’ve been a vegetarian for most of my life, and that the meat industry disgusts and infuriates me. I should probably preface my review by saying that I’ve been a vegetarian for most of my life, and that the meat industry disgusts and infuriates me. The main reason I picked up this book is that I believe our society is incredibly cruel and hypocritical in the way it tolerates animal abuse, and it’s high time literature exposes the public to the ugly truth they don’t want to face.
So many points raised by Bazterrica are timely and important. I was viscerally, nauseatingly enraptured by the first half of this novel. The society depicted here is both horribly dystopian and dangerously close to our own. The author pulls no punches when exposing the manufactured distinction between creatures worth protecting (humans or, in our world, pets) and those that can be tortured and slaughtered with impunity (heads, or farmed animals). It perfectly represents the mental gymnastics people use to justify their participation in factory farming, and the capitalist horror that makes the industry profitable.
And to the outraged reviewers saying that humans “don’t have it in their hearts to be so cruel”: read about the history of slavery and genocides and you’ll quickly realize that de-humanizing certain demographics for personal profit is something we as a species are all too good at. Many elements of this dystopia are actually pulled from history and show the extent of human capacity for evil when society allows it.
Unfortunately, Tender is the Flesh completely lost me in its second half.
Most notably, at only 211 pages, this book is too long. The pacing lags and the plot relies entirely too much on shock value—which, fine, that’s part of the premise; but you can only recycle the same few gruesome points so many times before they become repetitive and therefore boring. You really don’t need multiple child rape and torture scenes to drive across the point that this society enables child abuse.
What really solidified my impression that the author was using cruelty for cruelty’s sake was characterization. Every single character apart from the protagonist is just relentlessly, irredeemably evil all the time. Even children are horrible monsters who do nothing but kick puppies while discussing how much they enjoy kicking puppies. I noticed that particular scene comes up frequently in reviews, and I think it’s because it encapsulates all of the novel’s main problems: repetitive, superfluous cruelty, stilted explanatory dialogue, inconsistent world building (are people deathly scared of animals, or are they not?).
Speaking of world building—and I can’t believe this point hasn’t been raised by anyone yet: how do nature and the global ecosystem keep functioning if all animals were exterminated decades ago? Thousands of animal species are literally essential to the survival of the planet. Yet this doesn’t seem to be a concern in this world. Also, we’re told over and over again that everyone hates animals and all species have been exterminated, yet there are still enough birds around that most people walk with an umbrella for fear that they’ll get pooped on and die? (Yes, this is an actual piece of information that gets discussed at length).
I was also disappointed that vegetarianism and veganism were never discussed as alternative options. While I know that this is set in Argentina, a country that traditionally consumes a lot of meat, I think it could have been interesting to explore other cultures’ lifestyles: for example, being vegetarian is very common in India, and one would think that it would become even more popular after animal meat became off limits.
Finally, I know this came out years before the pandemic and the author didn’t intend to make any parallelism, but the whole “evil government made up a fake deadly virus to scare people into changing their habits” conspiracy made me roll my eyes so hard. Really a plot point that hasn’t aged well....more
I can’t believe you read this book in grade nine and thought it a charming, entertaining tale full of lovable characters. Compared to Dear teenage me,
I can’t believe you read this book in grade nine and thought it a charming, entertaining tale full of lovable characters. Compared to you, I’m a little chickenshit who gets scared way too easily. If I were your parents, I would not let you pick this up without first making sure you know what the themes are, and without discussing it together afterwards—but then again, your parents would probably be too embarrassed to explain what exactly the vampire kiss is supposed to symbolize.
Above all, I’m a little concerned about your obsession with Lestat. I know you think he’s the sexiest male protagonist ever written, after Heathcliff of course (that’s a whole other can of worms we don’t have time to open now). However, I would gently encourage you to take a more critical look at his actions, especially the part where he abuses, manipulates, and stalks Louis and Claudia for literal decades. That’s… not great. Not really something a good love interest would do.
Speaking of Claudia: don’t blame her for “ruining Louis and Lestat’s relationship”. It’s really not her fault Lestat is a terminal narcissist and a whiny baby. No matter how hard the media try to convince you that women are to blame for everything, they aren’t—especially when the women in question are literal children who shouldn’t be involved in adult romance anyway.
Did you really read all of this without getting even a little bit frightened? If yes, you’re a badass. I wish I was just as unfazed by murder, violence, and gore as you are. Maybe that’s the beauty in reading uncritically, pouring yourself into a story with no ulterior motive or thought: you’re too immersed to take note of what goes on around your favorite vampires, and can just brush off the atrocities they commit as necessary evils. Chances are I will never be able to experience books like that again, but I’m glad you managed to do it before I came around to spoil your fun....more
I will never forgive this book for making me realize that fictional lesbians can be just as basic and boring as straight people.
If I had to describe OI will never forgive this book for making me realize that fictional lesbians can be just as basic and boring as straight people.
If I had to describe Our Wives Under the Sea in one word, I would say it's cold: everything from the writing style, to the characters, to the main romantic relationship felt impersonal and detached. The love story between Leah and Miri, which is supposed to be the crux of the narrative, never rang true to me because of how bland and emotionless all their interactions were. Similarly, their personalities seemed very generic—I had trouble keeping up with who was narrating because their voices were indistinguishable from one another. They’re boring middle class women with boring middle class lives, only sometimes we’re reminded that they’re gay because one of the straight side characters says a casually homophobic line. Armfield steadfastly refuses to engage with any of the themes she hints at (fear of disease, queer Catholic guilt, human control over nature, and so on), choosing instead to circle back to the fallout of a relationship that’s about as interesting as white bread.
It’s almost offensive how the author manages to take such an exciting premise and do absolutely nothing with it. After reading this book, I am fundamentally unconvinced that Armfield understands the purpose of horror as a genre—which is to say, reflecting societal anxieties by taking them to their extreme conclusions in a safe space. What are the fears, the issues that Our Wives Under the Sea aims to explore? Does it have anything to say at all, aside from “the deep sea is mysterious and scary”?
Most importantly: how do you write a story about lesbians and sea monsters, without making the monsters even a little bit sexy? Truly a remarkable achievement (derogatory)....more
For most of my adult life, I thought that horror just wasn’t for me. I associated the genre with older, male authors like H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen KFor most of my adult life, I thought that horror just wasn’t for me. I associated the genre with older, male authors like H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, whose work I never found especially compelling or relatable. The kind of characters and fears that their fiction centered seemed very distant from my lived experience, and their massive popularity placed them on a cultural pedestal that I simply wasn’t interested in challenging. What’s the point, I thought, in reading things that were designed to scare you? Isn’t real life terrifying enough?
All this changed when I stumbled upon a short story collection titled Things We Lost in the Fire. I read it because it came highly recommended by people I trusted, and only realized it was horror halfway through the book. By that point, I was so captivated by Mariana Enríquez’s twisted imagination that I just wanted more. So I started dipping my toes in horror fiction written by women and queer people, only to discover that I did, in fact, love to read stuff that was designed to scare me. What makes horror good, I learned, is precisely its ability to sublimate societal and cultural anxieties into fictional scenarios; to create an imaginary bubble—a safe space, if you will—where nightmarish ideas can be explored and dissected with no real-life consequence.
And it’s this facet of the genre that Enríquez excels at. Her ability to explore the dark side of womanhood, family relations, and Latin American history has always been apparent in her writing, but her craft reaches new heights in Our Share of Night. This monumental novel grapples with four decades of Argentinian history, dissecting how collective traumas caused by dictatorship, colonialism, and poverty impact individual characters and their relationships with one another.
Through the eyes of a violent, traumatized father and his young son, we come face to face with the machinations of a corrupt cult whose ultra-rich members will stop at nothing to become even more powerful. Greed, the author seems to say, is an insatiable, self-cannibalizing monster that exploits the marginalized before eventually destroying the privileged, too. I know cannibalism has basically become a trend in contemporary fiction, but Enríquez uses this trope with skill and purpose to make a point about how the ruling classes have historically used occultism to try and further their agendas. Speaking of which: I don’t know who wrote the copy for the American edition, but this is very much not a vampire novel. How anyone could read the book and come to this conclusion is a mystery to me.
At the end of the day, all I can say about Our Share of Night is that it was my favorite book I read last year. It cast a spell on me that I haven’t been able to break ever since. Occasionally, I’ll find myself eyeing my copy on the bookshelf, tempted to pick it up and re-read a passage or two; but the anguish and distress it caused me are still so fresh in my mind that I can’t bring myself to do it. Turning the last page, I felt just like Gaspar, haunted by horrors too ancestral to be fully grasped by the human mind; only in my case, it was the monsters conjured by Mariana Enríquez’s imagination that I found impossible to shake off.
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