Rating:

Motherhood and Mayhem

Author: Nat Cassidy

Anna and Reid are a young couple with a new baby and a traumatic backstory. Their fertility struggles have rendered them emotionally raw, and Charlie’s birth has left formerly athletic Anna consigned to a wheelchair with dark feelings of resentment.  The sudden news that they’ve won a luxury apartment by Central Park in the exclusive Deptford building should signal a change in their luck. But something nags at Anna. Perhaps it’s the building’s unearthly silence, the grinning elevator operators, the twisting stairwells, the gargoyles that seem to move, that strange substance on the windows, and Charlie’s seemingly never-ending cries. They don’t belong here, but can they really say no?

Nestlings is a horror book filled with heavy concepts, centering on motherhood and disability. Anna leads the narrative, torn between guilt and denial, juggling an uncommunicative relationship with Ried, her husband, and an innate dislike of her own daughter. As Anna dodges that nagging preternatural warning and moves into the Deptford, she tries to go back to her recording job. She avoids confronting her new set of physical limitations, her violent resentments towards her infant daughter, and that one memory of a sharp knife.

A great portion of the novel stays with Anna, in her mind, working through her average days, actively in denial, while the building begins to unravel its insectile cravings around her. It starts slowly, but gradually the building reveals more and more of its secrets as Anna struggles with her own history – the cruel mother who raised her, her feelings towards Charlie and Ried, and her emotions surrounding disability and “otherness.”

Meanwhile, Ried confronts his dead-end job, all the while caring for his wife and daughter and actively avoiding thinking about the night he found his wife, knife in hand, over their daughter’s crib. As he drifts further from his wife, he begins an obsession with the Deptford itself and soon becomes involved deeply in the building’s history and with its wily inhabitants.

Nestlings contains some completely original monster fiction, combining Jewish methodology with gargoyles, vampires, and even insects. The villains here are to die for, and the creativity and ick factor is expertly crafted to jump between the terror of the unseen to the sanity shattering reality of what is glimpsed, crouching in the dark. Author Nat Cassidy does a stellar job oscillating between paranoia and suspense and revelation, concluding with an ending that lets the monsters literarily shine.

Where the story is less impacting is with Anna and Reid. They are interesting character studies, relatable to some degree, yet neither of them is especially likable. I worried for Charlie throughout the entire narrative and cringed at the blood drenched fantasies of infant violence. It’s disturbing, and not in the way of a good horror novel. Also, there haven’t been elevator operators since the 70s, so what’s the deal with that??

While Anna’s situation, combined with her slowly revealed backstory and horrific birth story, elicits some compassion, her vehemence is hard to understand and distancing to readers. We watch her flash back to and skirt memories of almost murdering her crying daughter, yet we see little beyond a transient sense of shame at being caught, at thinking and acting differently than expected. There is no true sense of guilt, and introspection is deftly avoided. Indeed, Anna and Ried are so good at avoiding reality, that it is difficult to engage with them, and nearly impossible to believe the character decisions and shifts at the end that leave them as pseudo-heroes (in their own bizarre ways.)

Is this a discussion on toxic motherhood? Yes, to an extent. But it goes too far and not far enough at the same time. The negative emotions are well explored, but the positive emotions or at least a healthy way to confront postpartum depression and disability are absent until the very ending, where we get a fairytale “I love my wheelchair and my daughter” mantra that falls flat.

In the end: monsters equal very good, more of them please. And main characters, very bad, less of them please or maybe different characters entirely. If only Anna and Ried had been more likable, a little less horrifically flawed and a little more willing to grow and show empathy towards one another and those around them, this could have been a five-star read. As it is, come for the monsters and the twist on Jewish mythology and leave everything else behind. Pseudo-recommended? Recommended with a desire for a remake?

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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