From Goodreads: Nat Cassidy’s highly commercial, debut horror novel Mary: An Awakening of Terror, blends Midsommar with elements of American Psycho and a pinch of I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.
But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.
Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.
Then the killings begin again.
Mary’s definitely going to find herself.
This review is Spoiler Free!
In Nat Cassidy's author's note, he begins by describing how as a child, he loved to look at the covers of horror movies to sort of "test" his own limits, (side note, I thought I was the only one who did this, this was literally my favorite thing ever to do as a kid), when he came across the cover of Stephen King's Carrie. The blood-drenched Carrie White haunted him, and he confessed to his own mother that he was scared. His mother explained the story of Carrie in a way that humanized her as a sad, bullied girl. And that story stuck with him.
Mary, a middle aged, peri-menopausal woman, feels incredibly invisible. Fired from her bookstore job, she goes back to her home town to help take care of her ailing aunt. But as she returns, she begins to see things, well - more things. In additions to the horrible visions she gets when she looks in the mirror, she begins to see terrible, bloody ghosts. As she continues to adjust to her old town again, Mary begins to recover more from her own fractured past, and finds more questions than answers.
Wow, I loved this book. I keep joking with my husband that my idea of an ideal horror novel is for it to just feel like an expertly crafted season of AHS. With all the twists and gut-wrenching turns of Mary, this truly did have that feel. Brilliantly crafted, with so much attention to detail, excellent pacing, and phenomenal mythos, this book was totally riveting! I truly wasn't expecting to love this one as much as I did, but this was absolutely brilliant. Terrifying and gory, Mary is a chilling character study that will stay with you.
*I received an ARC from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions and views in this review are my own.
~ Charlotte
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