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A review by simonlorden
Mother Knows Best by Lindy Ryan
3.5
I received an ARC through NetGalley and this is my honest and voluntary review.
This anthology is all about motherly love, obsession, protectiveness or neglect taken to horrific and sometimes supernatural extremes. It's all about mothers and daughters, with sons not really making an appearance. There are both short stories and poems alternating.
It was a little hit-or-miss for me. Some of the stories were really good, but some of them just felt too abstract - I like it when I actually understand what's happening in the story, even if it's horrific, and many of these just left me sort of confused instead of scared, cathartic, or whatever the intent was. This is also a personal preference, but I like when the author bios are right after the given story so that it's still fresh in my mind - when they're all included at the end, I have to keep scrolling back to see which author is which, and that's a bit difficult.
A few highlights:
- Oh, What a Tangled Web - This one builds up very nicely to the reveal.
- Little Mother - Out of the poems, this was definitely my favorite. Ouch, those last lines.
- Special Medicine - That twist!! Absolutely disgusting, but cathartic and well-deserved.
- Dog Mom - Musings about what makes a mother. I genuinely enjoyed this one, but honestly I wouldn't really consider it horror, so I was surprised to see it included here. It's mostly just sad and melancholic, with maybe one horrifying paragraph.
- Your Mother's Love is an Apocalypse - The second person narrative was a bit weird, but I liked the whole concept, a mother's possessiveness and abuse being taken to apocalyptic proportions.
This anthology is all about motherly love, obsession, protectiveness or neglect taken to horrific and sometimes supernatural extremes. It's all about mothers and daughters, with sons not really making an appearance. There are both short stories and poems alternating.
It was a little hit-or-miss for me. Some of the stories were really good, but some of them just felt too abstract - I like it when I actually understand what's happening in the story, even if it's horrific, and many of these just left me sort of confused instead of scared, cathartic, or whatever the intent was. This is also a personal preference, but I like when the author bios are right after the given story so that it's still fresh in my mind - when they're all included at the end, I have to keep scrolling back to see which author is which, and that's a bit difficult.
A few highlights:
- Oh, What a Tangled Web - This one builds up very nicely to the reveal.
- Little Mother - Out of the poems, this was definitely my favorite. Ouch, those last lines.
- Special Medicine - That twist!! Absolutely disgusting, but cathartic and well-deserved.
- Dog Mom - Musings about what makes a mother. I genuinely enjoyed this one, but honestly I wouldn't really consider it horror, so I was surprised to see it included here. It's mostly just sad and melancholic, with maybe one horrifying paragraph.
- Your Mother's Love is an Apocalypse - The second person narrative was a bit weird, but I liked the whole concept, a mother's possessiveness and abuse being taken to apocalyptic proportions.