Charlotte Kersten

“My name is Samantha.”

Year published: 2021

Categories: Adult, horror

Summary: Mattie can’t remember a time before she and William lived alone on a mountain together. She must never make him upset. But when Mattie discovers the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, she realizes that they’re not alone after all.

There’s something in the woods that wasn’t there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws.

When three strangers appear on the mountaintop looking for the creature in the woods, Mattie knows their presence will anger William. Terrible things happen when William is angry.

My Thoughts: I have mixed feelings about this one because the supernatural elements didn’t work for me at all but the psychological ones were stronger, in my opinion. The real strength of the book to me is in the way that the protagonist’s trauma is written in her internal monologue, as well as the way that she gradually works through her terror to start to question her world’s rigid rules and piece together her confusing memories and try to make sense of things, find agency, and escape. I like that she has several internal “voices” that are differentiated with different fonts and represent the parts of her that have been fragmented by the horror she’s experienced. It’s heartbreaking but also incredibly hopeful to see her start to interact with other people who aren’t dangerous and savor doing things as simple as eating tasty good to satiation for the first time that she can remember. So that’s the good stuff, and I really do think that it’s very good.

As for the bad: I would start by saying that there is a ton of what I would call “procedural” descriptions of people completing tasks and moving items around and talking about what they want to/are going to do. These sections were very boring to me and it was incredibly tempting to start skimming them. CP, Griffin and Jen fill this horror book’s quota for annoying twentysomethings who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, bicker and argue constantly and seem to be dead set on making the worst decisions possible. This is something that I talked about with Nothing But Blackened Teeth recently, but in this case it might actually be more infuriating because the protagonist is being SO BRAVE and trying SO HARD to keep everyone alive but they just keep ignoring what she says and end up being monster fodder!!!

This is the second book I’ve read recently that falls into the trope I fondly call “Maybe the Real Monster is Abuse,” and I do think that the metaphor was a little more successful in A Dowry of Blood. Ideally, I think there should be some kind of interesting parallel between the supernatural elements and the actual abuse/abuser, but that wasn’t really the case here. I also think my irritation at the side characters and repetition completely overshadowed any fear that I might have felt for the monster. I was definitely sad and disgusted and angered by everything that had to do with William, but I wasn’t ever really scared of anything in this book, and I think that’s probably because everything to do with the monster felt quite flat.