Motherthing

Starred review from June 27, 2022
Hogarth (The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated)) turns the tale of a haunting on its head in a masterfully crafted horror novel that’s by turns humorous and deeply unsettling. It opens as Abby Lamb and her husband, Ralph, return from the hospital after Ralph’s mother, Laura, died by suicide. For Abby, Laura’s demise is liberating; she never got along with her mother-in-law, whom she and Ralph moved in with years earlier, and Laura’s departure from their lives means they can finally start the family they’ve dreamed of. But Laura’s lingering influence assumes a tangible presence that thwarts her recovery efforts. As Ralph slips into a depressive funk under Laura’s ghost’s tight maternal grip, Abby grows increasingly desperate to exorcise Laura from their lives. Abby makes a wonderful narrator; full of wry insights and frothy humor, she fully engages reader sympathies—until revelations about her childhood with her own mother suggest that she may be projecting her troubled emotions onto others. This dark domestic drama packs a punch. Agent: Rach Crawford, Wolf Literary.

August 1, 2022
If you took Jane Fonda's character from the 2005 film Monster-in-Law, made her an angry ghost, and mixed that with Neil Gaiman's Coraline, you might get Hogarth's new novel. Abby, a worker at a long-term care home, wants more than anything to get along with her mother-in-law, Laura, but she has some obstacles to face: namely that Laura can't stand her. Death doesn't seem to bridge that divide, despite the fact that one of them is a ghost. This horror comedy is not for the faint of heart, and some readers may also be a bit confused by the shifts to a play-script format mixed in with the main text, usually indicating interactions between Abby and her husband, Ralph, in which they argue over Abby's obsession with starting a family. Despite the obstacles in her path, she tries to find a way to get her baby--any way she can. Fans of Jeff Strand, Grady Hendrix, and other dark-humor takes on horror will enjoy Motherthing.

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September 9, 2022

DEBUT When Abby Lamb's toxic mother-in-law dies by suicide, as the woman has said she would do for decades, Abby is a bit hard-pressed to hide her gleeful relief from Ralph, her grief-stricken husband. But the late Laura Lamb isn't really gone. Whether Laura's presence in their house is real or merely a manifestation of Ralph's guilty co-dependence and Abby's accumulated resentment, the couple's new lives are haunted by Laura's still-caustic presence. The further Ralph descends into depression, the more frantic and frenzied are Abby's attempts to break him out of his despair. Abby decides that if she can't rescue her husband through goodness, there are plenty of darker and more gruesome ways of getting her point across. Told in Abby's snarky, sarcastic, and increasingly unstable voice, this tale of psychological horror goes to places that invoke many trigger warnings, even as readers will cackle along with Abby's wry observations. VERDICT This debut adult novel from YA author Hogarth (The Boy Meets Girl Massacre) is recommended for horror readers who like to see all of everyone's issues eviscerated on the table and who won't mind never again being able to eat chicken � la king after the novel's disturbing take on it.--Marlene Harris

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
She's dead but she still won't leave: a mother-in-law horror story. Abby and Ralph Lamb were just a sweet, ordinary couple getting ready to start a family when Ralph's mother, Laura, turned their world into a living hell, first by insisting they move in with her, then by slitting her wrists in the basement. Even the resources Ralph downloaded from the Borderline Parent website can't help them with the version of Laura they have to deal with now--a vengeful ghost, a rampaging motherthing. Abby knows all too well about motherthings, having read the research on orphaned lab monkeys who need maternal affection so badly that a rolled-up pair of socks can do the trick and having resorted in her own youth to cuddling a corduroy couch while her own worthless fuckhole of a parent (get ready for lots of strong language and fecal imagery in this book) was busy paying attention to "Todd or Doug or Randy." Though Abby tried desperately to please her, Laura is as cruel in death as she was in life, and now the usually adoring Ralph is withdrawing into his own fog of hallucinatory despair. The only person who's still giving Laura any love at all is Mrs. Bondy, a nonverbal patient at the nursing home where she works--and if Mrs. Bondy's horrible daughter goes through with her plan to move her to a different facility, Abby will just have to kill her and serve Janet � la king for dinner. Hogarth's way with words enlivens every page of this psycho romp, whether describing its unlikely hero, Cud, "a fourteen-year-old Pomeranian, which hung from her hip like a colostomy bag and always had a look on his face like you'd forgotten to wish him a happy birthday," or a drawer full of plastic bags: "when one is pulled, they must all sing the crackling songs of their ancestors." Her fearlessness and utter lack of inhibition animate the desperate longing and bitter trauma at the heart of this ghost story, administered with a steady drip of comic relief. Profane, insane, hilarious, disgusting--and unexpectedly moving.

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