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A journalist recovering from the death of her husband is sent to a small town to investigate the claim that A HORSE GAVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN BABY.
I strongly dislike reading about normal human pregnancy and birth, but I love stories about bizarre births. I also love folk horror. So a story about a small town where a horse gives birth to a human baby sounded like just my jam.
Sadly, I really disliked this book. In fact the more I think about it, the more I dislike it.
My main beef with it is that very little of interest happens until about the last ten pages. The parts about the horse-human birth are cool! Ten pages of cool. Would've been a good short story.
There are eleven or twelve POV characters, but only one is actually necessary (the journalist) and only one is at all interesting (the teenage boy who is raising and claims to be the father of the horse baby). The rest are townspeople whose POVs don't add anything to the story, plus "The Horses," which ought to be interesting but wasn't because half of it was explaining what humans thought about the horses. I don't care what humans think about horses! When I'm in supposed horse POV, I want to be immersed in HORSE POV!
The setting is incredibly vague. I couldn't figure out if it was even in America or England until it mentioned the opioid crisis.
Aggravated spoilers.
The women in the village know that an entity in the nearby woods will transfer a human fetus to a horse in exchange for murdering someone. I think you have to personally kill someone rather than have the entity do it, but that's a bit vague. If you leave the horse-birthed human baby alone, it will TURN INTO A FOAL. If you take it away, it will stay human.
The teenage boy who is raising the horse baby got a teenage girl pregnant under annoyingly vague circumstances. He either outright raped her, or talked her into having sex when she didn't really want to. I feel like this is a very important distinction which should have been made clear. He mentions in one line that she's a lesbian, but this is never mentioned again including in her POV sections. She did the ritual to transfer the baby to a horse, but didn't murder anyone, so the entity maybe killed some people but also some guy in town is killing people, it was very confusing.
The idea of transferring a fetus to a horse is pretty cool but I was also a bit disappointed that there is no horse-human hybrid.
The premise is better than the book and the cover is also better than the book. I was in it for the horse baby but that's only about 10% of the book.
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I reread Stuart Little a few years back; as a kid, it was a fun adventure book, but as an adult, a woman giving birth to a 5-in mouse-human child…. well, I have questions. A lot of questions.
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A sudden overwhelming craving for seeds, grains, nuts, and fruit?
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(A quick web search suggests that a human fetus tends to be about five inches long around the end of the fourth month of pregnancy, so there might be some other indications of pregnancy at some point, although there would also be indications that something unusual was happening.)
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(If I’m remembering the book correctly, the mom goes into the hospital expecting a child, and comes back with Stuart. Which implies she looked pretty pregnant when she went in, so what was all the extra matter? and why were the parents so incredibly unflustered by the whole thing???)
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I am under the impression that occasionally pregnant women do not "show" even very late in the pregnancy. That was probably what the mom thought was going on.
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I was just reminded of Judith Tarr's A Wind in Cairo. No horse baby exactly...I think it would've been just a foal.