The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson
What if god was an eldritch horse?
This is a book where I have to talk about what happens or my review will be one line: “I liked it!” and that’s it1. I wouldn’t even be able to talk about the title, which is actually important foreshadowing. I went in blind so I had no idea if this book was a thriller or horror or supernatural fiction. I guess it’s a mix of all three but for people with low thresholds because a dead body or two is the extent of the gore.
Marshall is a journalist grieving her husband’s death and grappling with the guilt of feeling relief after her miscarriage. To help her get away, boss sends her to investigate a story in Raeford, a very rural town with a small population that’s known for horses and nothing much else. If this were a romcom, she’d have her Live Love Laugh moment on horseback and find the will to carry on after returning to the big city, but this is not that kind of story. The improbable story Marshall has to cover is that a horse has given birth to a human baby. The whole town seems cagey and reticent, wary of her as an outsider. The baby obviously belongs to Ros and his sort-of girlfriend, Emma, but Emma has left town and the horse really did give birth. How do these two events add up?
At the same time, John Daily is going around town being a menace and exploiting the vulnerable drug-addled youths of the town as usual, and wherever he goes, violence follows. Daily is Ros' grandfather but they are estranged; he is hated throughout town for corrupting the townswomen's sons and acting as if he were a law upon himself. Daily has made it his mission to uncover the women's secret, the one thing that has always been gatekept from him. He can't stand not knowing because he fears that it is something that gives the women power, and that one day they may turn that power against him and leave him helpless. In a way, he is right. In bits and pieces, Marshall finds out that there exists a ritual that only the women of this town know, a ritual passed down from other women and whispered about by other girls, a way for impoverished women to avoid either the yoke of single motherhood or to free themselves from the result of sexual assault.
How this ritual works—and this is the weird part—is that if you are pregnant and you no longer want to be, you can transfer the birth to a horse by visiting an old tree and performing a ritual there. A horse will give birth in your stead (and the baby will be 'Horseborn') and if you leave the baby in the barn, the "thing in the woods" will visit and turn it into a foal, but if you collect the baby, then the baby will remain human, and when they grow up and die, you have to leave offerings of milk and sugar on their gravestone forevermore or the eldritch creature will haunt you. For girls who get pregnant as a result of rape and have no money to go get an abortion in the city, this is their way out. But there is a price: human sacrifice. You have to give the beast someone you hate, someone you wish to take revenge on—the man who did this to you—and leave him for the beast to feast on so that it will be satisfied. If not, it will come into town looking for someone to sate its hunger with.
How this creature is described is that it's like a herd of a dozen or so horses but with no fixed form. Its massive bulk can be seen running through the forest. It has many eyes. It is preceded by opaque white fog that crawls through windows and the cracks under doors. The beast has a sharp face made of bone and mouth that is split too wide. It can enter houses. It can hunt humans. It can speak to you, so you can bargain with it, but at the end of the day, when it has been summoned, it must be given a life in exchange for a service rendered. Emma summoned it but left out the human sacrifice, and now John Daily feels haunted. To keep the creature off his back, he is willing to murder any number of expendable young men; in fact, he is even willing to let the creature take Emma or his own family members so long as he can live. But he's finding out the hard way that nothing works because he's not worthy, or at least that's how I read it.
What Daily does and the reason for his failure is that he tries to appropriate something that belongs to the women. The ritual is something that they do to protect themselves, a recourse for the rage that they cannot directly channel towards the men who harm them. By extension, the creature with all its powers and ability to strike fear in the hearts of men is the manifestation of female rage borne from their collective frustration and helplessness. The creature is not something to harness or control or misdirect for personal profit—that's what Daily does not understand, and I think that part of why he is obsessed with gaining access to this mystical power is because he cannot stand not being at the centre of the flow of power, not when he sees himself as beyond the church and the law and above women. When he abuses his power to bully Emma into telling him about the ritual so he can replicate it, he inadvertently digs his own grave; Emma's status as teenage mother is what grants her access to the creature and the deal that she struck with her own womb on the line is what ends up cleansing the town from a horrible man like Daily.
I find interesting as well the figure of the impotent priest in his crumbling white church who struggles and fails to overcome the superstitions that his religion teaches him are false. The priest stands by and does nothing when a murder is happening right in his own backyard because he has never once had the moral courage to stand up against the man with a gun. When he follows the rituals and leaves out offerings, it's not out of respect for the world beyond the veil, but out of cowardice after seeing the creature enter the church. In a way, he knows that this creature has a right to be there—if it did not, then it would not be able to enter hallowed grounds—but he continues in the sham of prayer and penitence, too afraid to admit that lofty beliefs have no hold on earthly realities. When he sees it fit to intervene, it is ironically in protection of the vilest murderer in town when he is about to get executed by the women who have had enough. Jason's chastisement of his hypocrisy was very, very cathartic to me.
To add on—I don’t see what’s wrong with spoilers in general because a review has to engage with the content, including important plot points, to be meaningful. If not, what are you reviewing? The book cover? The ~vibes~? I don’t get the obsession with avoiding content spoilers because it implies that a book’s greatest value lies in its plot twists or shock factors, which for me it never is.