Mary by Nat Cassidy

 

This is not a particularly bad novel, but it's not really a very good one, either. There's a blurb on the back that compares the main to Delores Claiborne but the King female character that persistently came to mind was Annie Wilkes--and the novel is mostly (except for some vaguely epistolary stuff at the end that feels more like an homage to Carrie than anything else) told from the main's first-person POV. The first ... 250 pages or so of this 400-ish page novel are bordering on fricking tedious, even as it becomes clearer that the main is a nutter (probably a nutter with some supernatural stuff going on, but a nutter). Yes, the novel has lots to say about how women are seen--or often not--especially as they get to middle age and beyond, and it's practically shaking with (justified) feminist rage; as has often happened lately when I've read (especially horror) fiction that wanted to have a Point, the author has forgotten that the story has to carry the weight of the subtext, not the other way around. As with much more-current horror, there's some confusion and/or conflation between monster/villain and hero, which leaves the novel without much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to take a moral position (and horror especially must take a moral position). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, neither jarring or really anything to write home about--Cassidy might be aiming at "invisible prose," which is a reasonable enough thing, but in the absence of a good story it leaves the reader without a lot of pleasure to take from the book. But it was not so bad I couldn't bring myself to finish it, which is something for me and current horror, these days.