GOODNIGHT MONSTERS

After becoming pregnant, a woman starts to have violent fantasies that seem to bleed into real life in Junered’s psychological thriller.

Ophelia “Lia” Montgomery is a housewife recently transplanted from New York to the South. The other women in her friend group have surrendered themselves to child care, brunch with the ladies, and the occasional pro-life protest; very Not New York. The conservative culture of this place is not foreign to Lia—she grew up outside the city, where she witnessed the death of her father as a teen, and her remaining family (a sister and her mother) still live nearby. Lia and her husband, Evan, want to make things work, but when Lia’s IVF treatment is successful and she suddenly becomes pregnant, she finds she no longer wants a baby. In an act of rebellion, Lia takes on a job as a forensic anthropologist at the “Body Farm,” grounds where corpses are sent to allow researchers to study how bodies decompose. Evan isn’t happy about Lia’s interest in being a working mom. She meets a handsome colleague, Robbie, and the two start a clandestine affair. Lia’s macabre job at the Body Farm seems connected to an onset of violent visions and fantasies of dead bodies and murder, and she can’t tell if they’re real or imagined—especially when Lia discovers that someone she recognizes from the local coffee shop is now a body at the Body Farm. The riveting narrative follows Lia spiraling into her intrusive thoughts as the tension ratchets up. Junered’s prose is compulsively readable—the writing is often elegant, with a sinister undertone. Lia and Robbie “drift down the dark river and the stars swallow [them] up”; the devouring sky is rendered as simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. The novel also effectively and humanely captures Lia’s prenatal psychosis, seemingly induced by the stress of the baby, as well as unresolved trauma related to her father’s death.

A thoroughly entertaining page-turner about the horrors of expecting.