Tantrum

Moulton (The Insatiable Volt Sisters, 2023) returns with a provocative, sinister, and trope-upending take on the bad-seed novel. Thea had a difficult childhood and is still dealing with her trauma, even after marrying an amazing and supportive man and becoming the mother to two kind and intelligent sons. But it is with the birth of her daughter, Lucia, and the undeniable understanding that this baby is a monster that Thea's dangerous memories of her own upbringing start to emerge. Told with dark humor and in Thea's conversational tone, Tantrum is Moulton staking her claim on the female-rage novel. Blending supernatural horror, generational trauma, and unapologetic yet relatable anger, Moulton's story gives Thea power over her life and control of her rage, allowing her to own it while still remaining a "good" girl. Original, shocking, and subversive, the purposeful disorientation and intense discomfort here will leave no reader unscathed. Suggest to a wide range of horror readers, from fans of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects (2006) to Ashley Audrain's The Push (2021), but especially the work of Hailey Piper.

This heavy-handed horror novel from Moulton (The Insatiable Volt Sisters) introduces Thea, a deeply unhappy young mother who's anxious about her toddler daughter, Lucia, a child with an unnatural number of teeth and a malevolent aura. Convinced she's given birth to a monster, Thea frets about what to do even as her increasingly surreal struggle to parent Lucia awakens repressed memories of her own abusive childhood. The novel is at its most successful when it's tightly focused on Thea's personal struggles, but Moulton's prose unfortunately veers wildly from somewhat generic domestic drama into confusing, phantasmagoric dream sequences that provide harrowing imagery, but add little to the overarching plot. Similarly unsuccessful are the attempts to generalize Thea's experiences to make clunky statements about motherhood and gender. Thea herself makes for a deeply unpleasant narrator, with much of the novel's attempts at humor coming from her cruel one-liners, and the supporting cast is thinly sketched. It's a disappointment. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Aug.)