Such A Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester (2022) We held off jumping right on to the keyboard to post on this one after we put the book down.......
Since we've never read anything quite like this, a furiously angry feminist horror novel, we thought we'd better take a few days to think about it......
Our initial reaction hasn't changed......basically, wow.
In structure, it resembles one of those Stephen King epics in which a malevolent, eternal entity returns through decade after decade, coming back to torment different generations of traumatized, dysfunctional families.
Except the monsters here have an ongoing agenda that Mitch McConnel, Donald Trump and the current majority on the Supreme Court would heartily approve of......to keep woman in their place, to stamp out and crush women and children with rebellious spirits. Such women, according to this monstrous gang who frequently manifest themselves as a pack of wild dogs, must be crushed and destroyed, their genitals ripped asunder.......with the exception of those few women they spare, whom they sense they've bent to their will.
True, the rampaging supernatural man-dogs serve as the author's crude, blunt metaphor for the patriarchy, but in the context of a horror thriller, it struck us as highly effective. These creatures are sort of like Stephen King's evil clown Pennywise ....only specifically re-imagined as a murderous misogynist, targeting women who dare to defy authority.
In separate timelines the book lays out the tortuous, fearful lives of Caroline and Lila, a mother and daughter both haunted and bedeviled by their encounters with the dog-demons. The creatures' abductions and slaughter of young girls every 15 years are invariably mistaken for the work some human serial killer.
And Caroline and Lila's horrific visions and memoires end up categorized as paranoid schizophrenic delusions......Caroline's forced to submit to therapy from a psychiatrist who fairly oozes with patronizing condescension, but the free spirited Lila becomes determined to have a final reckoning with the monsters.......and like just like Uncle Stevie King, Kristi DeMeester arranges a spectacular final confrontation that doesn't stint on on the horror and gore.
As you might have already guessed from the book's fierce, howling agenda, the few male characters here are.....uh......not treated well. Even Daniel, Caroline's live-in lover (and later father to Lila) a potentially sympathetic soul, commits a foul act of betrayal against Caroline that, given her character, seems no less a degrading insult than actual infidelity.
We should point out that the many sequences of overwhelming dread are as skillfully done here as anything equivalent we've read in a King novel.........when it's time to get down to the business of scaring you, the book goes all out to deliver those booga-booga moments you'd demand in a story like this.
What readers may not have expected......a horror book with a hell of lot more on its mind than simply scaring you silly. "Such A Pretty Smile" gets the job done on all counts. 4 stars (****).
No comments:
Post a Comment