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Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power

cover art for Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle

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Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle

Melville House Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13 : 978-1612197920

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Sady Doyle has written a witty, chatty, insightful, and angry book on female monstrosity. Her premise is that women who claim ownership over their voices and bodies are constructed as monsters because they violate the social and biological norms that threaten men’s control over them- they are a threat to the patriarchy. Doyle identifies three key roles women fill in our patriarchal society and divides the book into sections on “daughters”, “wives”, and “mothers”. She has a lot to say about mothers: that section gets twice the number of pages as the other two sections combined.

Doyle has combed through pop culture, history, literature, fairy tales, myths, horror, true crime, sociology, and personal anecdotes to find examples and support for her theories, and when she does a deep dive into a topic (as she did on a number of girls and women, including Annelise Michel, Bridget Cleary, and Augusta Gein), or a critique of The Conjuring, it is fascinating and memorable. However, Doyle jumps around a lot, and it isn’t always clear how things are related.  Her writing flows well, and she does a nice job making it relevant and tying it to recent events.

If you’re looking for an enjoyable feminist take on monstrous women, you’ve found it.

The book includes an annotated list of works cited, endnotes, and an index.

 

Recommended.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sady Doyle’s premise is that female monstrosity is determined by patriarchy, which she describes as a social, cultural, and moral structure that is founded in men’s absolute power and control over at least one woman, generally through instilling fear in them.  Doyle contends that women who claim ownership over their voices and bodies are constructed as monsters because they violate social and biological norms that threaten men’s control over them. She identifies three key roles women fill in our patriarchal society, and devotes a section of her book to “daughters”, one to “wives”, and one to “mothers”. She chooses from a variety of literary, legendary, historical, and pop culture examples and stories to discuss female monsters, both fictional and real, that exist outside society (or are ostracized by society), and the female victims of monsters that the patriarchy requires.

Posted on February 1, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Five Midnights by Ann Davila Cardinal

Five Midnights by Ann Cardinal Davila

Tor Teen, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1250296078

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, and audiobook

“When the U.S. gets a cold, Puerto Rico gets pneumonia.” In the United States, the mainland tends to forget that Puerto Rico is part of the country, and many Puerto Ricans have learned that federal government agencies don’t really want to get involved when disaster hits due to this (witness the travesty of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria). Five Midnights takes place before the hurricane hit, but it is easy to see that mainlanders, mostly white and wealthy, are viewed with suspicion due to their contribution to gentrification, which is driving locals out of even middle class neighborhoods to areas where gangs, drugs and crime are profitable and attractive tp teenagers trying to make it in a struggling economy. It’s no surprise when Vico, a successful teenage drug dealer, dies violently while on his way to a deal, but what only the reader knows is that the death is due to a shadowy, clawed, supernatural creature.

Enter Lupe, a half-Puerto Rican, half-white teenager who has traveled from Vermont to Puerto Rico to spend the summer with her aunt and uncle (who is also the chief of police). Lupe is independent and contrary, and fascinated by crime, an interest her uncle has previously encouraged. The case of the drug dealer touches on a family member, her cousin Izzy, who has disappeared, and her uncle does not want her involved, but that only makes Lupe more determined. Lupe is feminist in a very teenage girl “I can do it myself, don’t you dare help me” kind of way,  an attitude that made an otherwise independent young woman seem like she needed to be rescued (for instance, walking into traffic because it was suggested she wait, and having to be pulled out of the street after nearly getting hit by a car). Her character does grow a lot as she meets a variety of people and experiences parts of Puerto Rico she wouldn’t have seen as a tourist and begins to understand the impact the mainland, and especially mainland investors, are having on the country. Cardinal does a great job in describing pre-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico. I almost felt like I was there. I want to give her props, too, for her portrayal of adults in the story. YA fiction frequently depicts adults as clueless and closed-minded, but when these teens really needed them, the majority of adults listened, and stepped up, without taking over.

Because Lupe resembles her white mother instead of her Puerto Rican father, she  also gets a lesson in colorism. Although she sees herself as Puerto Rican, the other teens she encounters call her “gringa”, white girl. It’s confusing to her at first, because she identifies as half-Puerto Rican, and can’t understand why no one else understands that. However, she comes to recognize that she does have white privilege and as a mainland American takes some things for granted that many Puerto Ricans cannot. At the same time, the friends she makes come to recognize that there are parts of her that are very Puerto Rican after all, even if they’re not immediately visible.

Our other major character is Javier, who grew up with Vico and Izzy, but kicked his drug habit and is working hard to stay clean and make up for the damage he did while he was involved with drugs. Despite a rocky beginning, Lupe and Javier decide to team up to find Izzy and solve Vico’s murder. They become more and more convinced that El Cuco, a shadowy supernatural creature bent on retribution is after Javier and his friends. It is refreshing to see a monster  grounded in local folklore, appearing in a contemporary story, instead of the same tired tropes.

I loved seeing Puerto Rico take center stage when so often it’s ignored, and enjoyed watching Lupe and Javier puzzle out the mystery and each other. The climax is an outstanding, terrifying, mystical, and visually evocative piece of writing. This was Cardinal’s debut novel, and I look forward to her next one, Category Five, set in post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.  This is a truly Stoker-worthy book. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: violence, murder, mild gore, drug abuse

Editor’s note: Five Midnights was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on April 15, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet by Akwake Emezi

Make Me A World, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0525647072

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audio CD, audiobook

 

There was a time before the angels came when monsters caged children, polluted the environment, refused to send aid to hurricane victims and refugees, bombed civilians in other countries, shot up schools, and hurt and killed the people around them. The angels led a revolution, changed the laws, and replaced the monuments. Jam’s teachers tell her these angels took their names from angels who weren’t human: but they were imperfect humans doing their best to create a more compassionate, safer, and more just world, and by the time Jam, our protagonist, was born, there are no more monsters.

Or are there?

Jam, curious about the original angels, heads to the library and asks about them, but the pictures she finds are terrifying, not beautiful. She wonders, if angels are terrifying, what do monsters look like? And how would you know? Jam’s mother, Bitter, tells her, “Monsters don’t look like anything… That’s the whole point.” Bitter, an artist, has been consumed with creating a painting of a bloody, goat-legged, horned creature with metallic feathers, and after it is finished, Jam sneaks in to Bitter’s studio and accidentally cuts herself on a razor blade Bitter has embedded in the canvas. Bleeding over it opens a portal, and the creature pushes through, telling Jam to call it Pet.  Pet is a hunter of monsters, called through by her because there is a monster in her friend Redemption’s house that needs hunting, but the adults in Jam’s life are not willing to recognize that a monster could still be in their midst.

I feel like this is Emezi’s response to N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones That Stay and Fight”, which takes place in a utopian alien society where all people are respected for who they are, but knowledge of the outside world is illegal. That story ends with “social workers” executing a man found to be communicating with the less enlightened people of Earth in front of his daughter and taking her into custody to also become a social worker. In that story, questioning is not allowed and people are willing to live in ignorance of the evils of the past in order to live in their ideal society, and a child who gains that knowledge must become part of enforcing the need for that ignorance.

Pet, while it takes place in our near future, reflects some of this abstract speculative thinking, but as a book written for children, it needs to be set out in a concrete way. Emezi has created a society that is a little different from Jemisin’s: many of the people who live in the community remember the time of the monsters, before the revolution eliminated them, but they choose to believe the monsters are gone. The children born after the revolution learn about that time, but aren’t curious about it. Even knowing that they should remember the past, the people are focused on the the blessings of the present. In visiting her friend Redemption’s house, which has always seemed a loving place, Pet encourages Jam to look past the surface to see the unseen. It is uncomfortable for Jam to question what she has always seen and felt there, even knowing there is a monster in the house, and to tell Redemption about it. It is scary to learn about the monsters that existed in families in the past and realize they are still around. It is terrifying to confront trusted adults and have them refuse to believe. No one actually stops Jam and Redemption, but the adults don’t believe the monster exists, even knowing a child is suffering. Pet is there to end the hunt, and the monster, but Jam has to decide exactly what that means. Pet has a more positive vision for the future than Jemisin saw, but it is clear about the perils of believing that there can be an ideal world where monsters no longer exist.

Pet also n9rmalizes and celebrates differences without going into detail about them. Jam is a 16 year old black trans girl who is a selective mute; Redemption has three parents, one of whom is nonbinary; the librarian whizzes around in a wheelchair.  Emezi does not stick with standard English. Language is very individual and informal, and dialogue is sometimes almost musical. Without going into graphic detail. Emezi is able to communicate who the monster in Redemption’s house is, and what he has done.

While Jam is supposed to be 16, she neither acts or is treated like a 16 year old. Her thoughts and actions are more like what I would expect from a 10-12 year old, and I think she may have been “aged up” to make it possible for her to have used puberty blockers and had transition surgery (neither of these details are necessary to establish her as a transgender character, so if that was Emezi’s reasoning, the story would have benefited from aging Jam’s character down). While the story does get very dark, I think kids as young as fifth grade might be able to manage this book. At this point, fifth graders have certainly been exposed to the news, and this book gives them a way to process what they’re seeing in the media from a different perspective.  Certainly, my children both read The Giver, which has similar themes, at that age. This is a very relevant book, and while not typical horror, it does have unsettling and disturbing moments. Highly recommended.

Contains: Violence, references to rape and child sexual abuse

 

 

Posted on November 7, 2019 by , Reply
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