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Mary is an isolated, socially anxious woman who lives alone except for a collection of porcelain dolls which she calls her Loved Ones. When she turns 50 and starts having perimenopausal symptoms, she also finds that if she sees the face of a middle-aged woman - her own included - she starts seeing it decaying. Unsurprisingly, doctors dismiss her in the exact same patronizing manner that the rest of the world dismisses her. She's a middle-aged woman; she's invisible and worthless.
The one person who actually knows her, the aunt who raised her and who she's been estranged from for 30 years, calls her and asks her to come take care of her for a while. Mary accepts, and so returns to the little desert town where she'll be seeing people who knew her as a child. Weird shit ensues.
I was first alerted to Mary by listening to a podcast interview with the author, in which he said it was inspired by Carrie only with menopause instead of menstruation. I was very enthusiastic about this idea, as well as disappointed that I hadn't thought of it first. As it turns out, though Carrie was the inspiration, Cassidy wrote a very different book. Mary is not a book about an outcast woman who gets supernatural powers with menopause and takes revenge with them.
What Mary is actually about isn't formally revealed until about a third of the way in, but it is revealed in the blurb and it's obvious to the reader way before Mary admits it to herself. In fact you can figure it out from the the prologue. But just in case anyone would rather go in totally unspoiled...
She's the reincarnation of and possessed by a male serial killer who hates and murdered middle-aged women.
I had very mixed feelings about this book. Mary is a great character and I liked her a lot, even though she's not likable in the normal sense of the world. Her Aunt Nancy is a very fun character, ditto. The narration is often very funny in a dark way, and the climax is excellent.
However. There is a particular trope that I don't mind in short stories but which drives me crazy at longer length. It's the homicidal maniac in transparent denial of being a homicidal maniac. It's repetitive and tedious at any length of more than about 15 pages. And it's 100+ pages of Mary.
Cassidy is taking on some big topics and props to him for doing so, but I wanted a different take than the one he went with.
Mary's internalized misogyny is actually the voice of the serial killer possessing her; she sees middle-aged women as horrors because he does. This is a pretty cool idea and makes thematic sense, and the scene where she boots the serial killer out of her head is great.
But it wasn't the horror story about misogyny and menopause that I wanted. I thought I was going to get Carrie-like outcast Mary who takes revenge with the psychic powers she got via menopause, and for her to be a sympathetic monster, if a monster at all, lashing out because she was genuinely wronged.
It turns out that Mary is an outcast because she was violent and creepy practically from birth, and people were correctly picking up that she was a monster even apart from the possession. She was the violent bully, not the bullied one as she'd wrongly remembered.
When she kicks out the serial killer in her head, she goes on to be a serial killer in her own right, and not just of people who in any way deserve it. She's also not psychic and doesn't have powers per se. She sees ghosts, but it's because the ghosts can be seen sometimes and she figures out how to interact with them, not because she has special ghost-related powers. And finally, menopause isn't even important for Mary herself, it kicks things off because her inner misogynist serial killer is freaked out by it.
It's made very explicit that Mary is a monster because some people are monsters and this is a horror novel, not because menopausal women are inherently monsters. But in pushing the responsibility for Mary's internalized misogyny onto a literal inner misogynist, it also means that a whole lot of her actions and inner world aren't even hers.
When she finally frees herself, she becomes less interesting, not more. The inner conflict and repression and desires to do good and have friends, warring with pure fury, was what made her interesting. Then she ditches all that and becomes a serial killer and murders everyone in sight, one by one, some for reasons and some just because.
"Just because" is a boring motive. Whenever I encounter it I think of this scene from the X-Files episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."
KILLER: So there's something I've been wanting to ask you for some time now. You've seen the things I do in the past as well as in the future.
CLYDE BRUCKMAN: They're terrible things.
KILLER: I know they are. So, tell me, please, why have I done them?
CLYDE BRUCKMAN: Don't you understand yet, son? Don't you get it? You do the things you do because you're a homicidal maniac.
KILLER: That... that does explain a lot, doesn't it?
Another problem with the book is that Mary has no real relationships. She and Aunt Nancy are fun together, but they're not emotionally connected. Mary makes ONE friend who is extremely obviously befriending her for sinister purposes, and once Mary realizes that, she kills her without any inner conflict. The ghosts no longer have human feelings. And so forth.
Cassidy obviously did a lot of research and talked to a lot of women to write the book, but he missed one bit. Mary's interactions with doctors are condescending, and Cassidy obviously thinks the doctors are being horrible to her and is outraged by it. In fact, her doctor interactions are actually very good on a scale of "woman dealing with doctors." If I'd had any of them, I'd have walked out thinking, "Oh thank God, that wasn't anywhere near as bad as it could have been."
I listened to the audio version of Mary, and would have given up on the entire book if it hadn't been one of the best audiobook performances I've ever encountered. Susan Bennett absolutely nails Mary's voice. She's hilarious and scary and riveting. So I'm not sorry I persevered but Nestlings is a big improvement. Cassidy wrote Mary under really bad circumstances and a lot of sleep deprivation, often in fifteen-minute chunks, and you can kind of tell.
Content notes: Extremely, extremely gory, to the point that I skipped some parts. Gruesome dog death. Child harm. Depictions of misogyny (not endorsed by author).
The one person who actually knows her, the aunt who raised her and who she's been estranged from for 30 years, calls her and asks her to come take care of her for a while. Mary accepts, and so returns to the little desert town where she'll be seeing people who knew her as a child. Weird shit ensues.
I was first alerted to Mary by listening to a podcast interview with the author, in which he said it was inspired by Carrie only with menopause instead of menstruation. I was very enthusiastic about this idea, as well as disappointed that I hadn't thought of it first. As it turns out, though Carrie was the inspiration, Cassidy wrote a very different book. Mary is not a book about an outcast woman who gets supernatural powers with menopause and takes revenge with them.
What Mary is actually about isn't formally revealed until about a third of the way in, but it is revealed in the blurb and it's obvious to the reader way before Mary admits it to herself. In fact you can figure it out from the the prologue. But just in case anyone would rather go in totally unspoiled...
She's the reincarnation of and possessed by a male serial killer who hates and murdered middle-aged women.
I had very mixed feelings about this book. Mary is a great character and I liked her a lot, even though she's not likable in the normal sense of the world. Her Aunt Nancy is a very fun character, ditto. The narration is often very funny in a dark way, and the climax is excellent.
However. There is a particular trope that I don't mind in short stories but which drives me crazy at longer length. It's the homicidal maniac in transparent denial of being a homicidal maniac. It's repetitive and tedious at any length of more than about 15 pages. And it's 100+ pages of Mary.
Cassidy is taking on some big topics and props to him for doing so, but I wanted a different take than the one he went with.
Mary's internalized misogyny is actually the voice of the serial killer possessing her; she sees middle-aged women as horrors because he does. This is a pretty cool idea and makes thematic sense, and the scene where she boots the serial killer out of her head is great.
But it wasn't the horror story about misogyny and menopause that I wanted. I thought I was going to get Carrie-like outcast Mary who takes revenge with the psychic powers she got via menopause, and for her to be a sympathetic monster, if a monster at all, lashing out because she was genuinely wronged.
It turns out that Mary is an outcast because she was violent and creepy practically from birth, and people were correctly picking up that she was a monster even apart from the possession. She was the violent bully, not the bullied one as she'd wrongly remembered.
When she kicks out the serial killer in her head, she goes on to be a serial killer in her own right, and not just of people who in any way deserve it. She's also not psychic and doesn't have powers per se. She sees ghosts, but it's because the ghosts can be seen sometimes and she figures out how to interact with them, not because she has special ghost-related powers. And finally, menopause isn't even important for Mary herself, it kicks things off because her inner misogynist serial killer is freaked out by it.
It's made very explicit that Mary is a monster because some people are monsters and this is a horror novel, not because menopausal women are inherently monsters. But in pushing the responsibility for Mary's internalized misogyny onto a literal inner misogynist, it also means that a whole lot of her actions and inner world aren't even hers.
When she finally frees herself, she becomes less interesting, not more. The inner conflict and repression and desires to do good and have friends, warring with pure fury, was what made her interesting. Then she ditches all that and becomes a serial killer and murders everyone in sight, one by one, some for reasons and some just because.
"Just because" is a boring motive. Whenever I encounter it I think of this scene from the X-Files episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."
KILLER: So there's something I've been wanting to ask you for some time now. You've seen the things I do in the past as well as in the future.
CLYDE BRUCKMAN: They're terrible things.
KILLER: I know they are. So, tell me, please, why have I done them?
CLYDE BRUCKMAN: Don't you understand yet, son? Don't you get it? You do the things you do because you're a homicidal maniac.
KILLER: That... that does explain a lot, doesn't it?
Another problem with the book is that Mary has no real relationships. She and Aunt Nancy are fun together, but they're not emotionally connected. Mary makes ONE friend who is extremely obviously befriending her for sinister purposes, and once Mary realizes that, she kills her without any inner conflict. The ghosts no longer have human feelings. And so forth.
Cassidy obviously did a lot of research and talked to a lot of women to write the book, but he missed one bit. Mary's interactions with doctors are condescending, and Cassidy obviously thinks the doctors are being horrible to her and is outraged by it. In fact, her doctor interactions are actually very good on a scale of "woman dealing with doctors." If I'd had any of them, I'd have walked out thinking, "Oh thank God, that wasn't anywhere near as bad as it could have been."
I listened to the audio version of Mary, and would have given up on the entire book if it hadn't been one of the best audiobook performances I've ever encountered. Susan Bennett absolutely nails Mary's voice. She's hilarious and scary and riveting. So I'm not sorry I persevered but Nestlings is a big improvement. Cassidy wrote Mary under really bad circumstances and a lot of sleep deprivation, often in fifteen-minute chunks, and you can kind of tell.
Content notes: Extremely, extremely gory, to the point that I skipped some parts. Gruesome dog death. Child harm. Depictions of misogyny (not endorsed by author).
From:
no subject
On the other hand, this sounds like a really interesting idea for a middle-aged or older woman to write just to see where she'd take it and how she'd get there. I feel like "possessed by a male" turns the whole thing into a man's adventure, ultimately.
From:
no subject
The male possession was intended to be literal internalized misogyny but I didn't like it for many reasons, including that it made a man central to a woman's story.
From:
no subject
In fact I was thinking the dolls were a clue, that maybe they were possessed or something. This whole set-up could be written without male characters at all -- the fact that one's world view, and personality to an extent, seem to change during this period (ha) could have been a great journey for the book. My attitude is certainly changing, and there's a lot of potentially deep philosophical stuff that could make a fine horror novel.
From:
no subject
The dolls turn out to be completely irrelevant!
My perimenopause was absolutely wretched, but I am LOVING being post-menopausal. I now have the superpower to resist cold, and not because of hot flashes. I just don't get as cold any more.
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(Puberty/menopause comparisons always remind me that my mom went through perimenopause the same year I got my period. We'd yell at each other until we both burst out laughing, most days—we are not yellers, generally, but that year we needed it. We both remember it fondly now! My dad, not so much.
... if we had gotten superpowers at that point we would not have used them for revenge, probably, but there would still have been havoc.)
From:
no subject
I too want to read your take on that prompt.