Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder is a gory body horror fest that centers around the lives of three different women during a mysterious viral outbreak.
Erin: a queer woman exploring her sexuality who begins to crave brains.Savannah: a dominatrix who’s urged to commit murder on behalf of eldritch gods.
Mareva: a teratoma patient whose tumor-like growths may have a far more sinister cause.
Coming into this book, I really wanted to love it since it sounded like a cosmic horror spin on a zombie outbreak. However, what I got instead was a kitchen sink. So many ideas were haphazardly thrown in together that the author couldn't develop them all, resulting in a undercooked mess of a novel.
With that said, let’s dive into what didn’t work for me (and warning, there will be major spoilers ahead):
- Floating head syndrome. There are three narrators with no chapter headers to differentiate them by, and, asides from Savannah, the other women's voices felt too stylistically similar for me.
- The book's clumsy attempt at racial commentary.
In this book, we have Savannah, who’s infatuated with the idea of killing a black nurse, compares herself to Jeffery Dahmer, and, upon killing her, is then confronted by her ghost. The following conversation between the two feels so unnatural that it reads more like a bad SNL parody. I kid you not, this is the actual dialogue from the finished book:
"'That’s why I killed a strong, accomplished woman of color who was pretty much the living embodiment of the American Dream instead of going in search of a scrub. You looked consumable.'"
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are horror books like The Ballad of Black Tom and Ring Shout that artfully examine the effects of racism, but Sister, Maiden, Monster is not one of them.
- The uneven pacing.
This book is filled with infodumps galore that could have been more organically integrated into the novel.
Also, the blurb describes that the story follows the “aftermath of our planet’s disastrous transformation,” and yet, the apocalyptic event doesn’t occur until 2/3 ways through the novel and we don’t get to even see the collapse of civilization since the remainder of the book is told from the POV of a woman who is being held captive.
And that brings me to the incredibly rushed ending.
First, we have Erin’s final transformation and the climax of her character arc where she sews herself to Betty told through Mareva’s POV, which seems like such a missed opportunity. Erin’s scene would have felt far more emotionally impactful from her own point of view.
On top of that, instead of Mareva using her own wits to find a way to escape her captors and not become a baby machine, Hastur appears as a deus ex machina to give her a magic birth control ring and poofs away.
This just felt like lazy writing to me and a means to quickly tie up plot threads in a way that doesn’t feel earned within the story.
All in all, there were glimmers of moments that I enjoyed (like an oddly tender and intimate scene involving brain jelly). There's some wonderfully gross body horror in here, but the overall execution of this story was so poor that I feel that it would have benefitted from a great deal more of developmental editing before publication.
Thank you, NetGalley and Tor Nightfire, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are horror books like The Ballad of Black Tom and Ring Shout that artfully examine the effects of racism, but Sister, Maiden, Monster is not one of them.
- The uneven pacing.
This book is filled with infodumps galore that could have been more organically integrated into the novel.
Also, the blurb describes that the story follows the “aftermath of our planet’s disastrous transformation,” and yet, the apocalyptic event doesn’t occur until 2/3 ways through the novel and we don’t get to even see the collapse of civilization since the remainder of the book is told from the POV of a woman who is being held captive.
And that brings me to the incredibly rushed ending.
First, we have Erin’s final transformation and the climax of her character arc where she sews herself to Betty told through Mareva’s POV, which seems like such a missed opportunity. Erin’s scene would have felt far more emotionally impactful from her own point of view.
On top of that, instead of Mareva using her own wits to find a way to escape her captors and not become a baby machine, Hastur appears as a deus ex machina to give her a magic birth control ring and poofs away.
This just felt like lazy writing to me and a means to quickly tie up plot threads in a way that doesn’t feel earned within the story.
All in all, there were glimmers of moments that I enjoyed (like an oddly tender and intimate scene involving brain jelly). There's some wonderfully gross body horror in here, but the overall execution of this story was so poor that I feel that it would have benefitted from a great deal more of developmental editing before publication.
Thank you, NetGalley and Tor Nightfire, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Book Details:
Publication Date : February 21, 2023
Publisher : Tor Nightfire
ASIN : 1250825652
Pages : 272
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