A review by nostoat
The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson

5.0

Myths about horses begin with the sea, but there is no sea near Raeford. There are small, wandering creeks and the Narrow Bone River, but no sea. So Raeford’s horses must have come from somewhere else, not fighting out of the waves but wandering out of the dark forests, rising from the pine needles, tumbling down like ripe apples from the branches. 

This is folk horror at its finest. It's hard to even put my thoughts together because I'm still a little lost on the back roads and among the trees. Like all the best folk horror, this book is about an insular community with an understood secret. This community is a little more porous than it used to be, closer to The City than it was in generations past, and a tabloid has reported about a strange thing: seemingly a horse gave birth to a human infant? Or something like that. Our token POV Outsider arrives partially to "cover" the story, but mostly as a pity assignment so she can recover from her own raw grief over a recent tragedy in her life. Instead of the shitty assignment she expected, Marshall instead finds a town tight and hot with secrets and unspoken tensions and hatreds, almost like an infection. 

There's so much here. Addiction, migrant workers, the way a community forms around an industry and that industry becomes their lifeblood, the slow bleed of young people to the wider world, the ever-present reality of teenage pregnancy... And at the heart of it all, picked out in glimpses, is a story of women and girls, gripping every scrap of power and confidence they can in a community that does not particularly want to grant it to them. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings