Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Five horror novels driven by maternal instinct

Amanda Mactas is a freelance writer based in New York City. She’s on a mission to stay in as many haunted houses around the world as possible and is currently reading her way through the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. Despite what it may seem, she’s pretty normal.

At Tor.com, Mactas tagged five novels in which maternal instinct helps to drive the plot, including:
The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

Alternating between the past and present day, this novel weaves together two stories that take place in the same old house in a creepy, rural town in Vermont. In the early 1900s, Sara was mysteriously found dead behind her home a few months after the tragic passing of her daughter. In current day, Alice and her two daughters live in Sara’s old home when one day Ruthie, her oldest, wakes up to discover her mother has gone missing. In Ruthie’s search for her mother, she uncovers Sara’s old diary and begins to find out what really happened to her family so long ago. The Winter People isn’t the first novel to explore how far people would go to hold on to the ones they love and it certainly won’t be the last. Like in Pet Sematary and Harry Potter, we find out that bringing people back from the dead never goes as planned. These families, along with others in the story, show their love through desperation and their attempts to spend just a few more moments with the people they love. It’s chilling, relatable and completely unpredictable.
Read about the other entries on the list.

The Winter People is among Melissa Albert's five dark thrillers to soothe your Valentine’s Day hangover.

--Marshal Zeringue