Lucy Snyder’s hit novel Sister, Maiden, Monster has garnered a lot of popularity within the off-beat horror fiction market. It’s a quick read–I got through it in a weekend, even with a one-year-old. And it’s good.

It’s effectively three novellas, really. Each part is a different narrator: a newly proposed to fiancee who is sick with the new pandemic virus (this book is a post-COVID plague novel), then a sex worker who is helping an Elder God (because it’s also cosmic horror), then a cancer-prone woman who was the fiancee’s coworker and is destined to become a broodmother to cosmic godlings. If you can’t tell from the character descriptions, this book is a hard look at what it means to be female in the 21st century and for that it is absolutely worth a read to any woman.

For me, this book was really only lacking in that many of the scenes that don’t feel fully explored. Like the book could have taken another 50 pages. For that, I knock it down to an 8.

All of that said, this is very much not a book for everyone. Sensitive readers will find themselves confronted with potentially difficult themes including nonconsensual sex, domestic violence, and misogyny. Reader beware, and all that.