Erasure Bloody and Brutal
A review of Mary: An Awakening of Terror, and feminine invisibility
There’s a corpse in the bathtub.1
Mary: An Awakening of Terror starts with a bang: the hunt for serial killer Damon Cross, and the birth of the titular protagonist. It’s a brilliant, bloody opening that gave me a bit of fuel to get through the next few chapters that set up the novel.
I’ll give you the quick and dirty summary and spare you from scanning Goodreads reviews: 49 years after Damon Cross’ killing spree (and Mary’s birth), Mary is going through changes that she wishes were just because of menopause. The recurring nightmares and visions of her face decomposing when she looks in the mirror, however, aren’t really textbook symptoms. She’s promptly fired from her job in the first handful of chapters, and, out of options, she returns to her hometown to live with her (horrible but also hilarious) Aunt Nadine. But between her internal hauntings and the famous Arroyo killings beginning again, something is up.
Mary accomplished both scares and social commentary. The horror of Mary is both internal (reincarnation plot points) and external (the killings, visions of ghosts), which beautifully intertwines Cassidy’s feminist critique and his clever horror mystery.
Nat Cassidy is one of the few male authors who nails the female experience. In the author’s afterword, bearing the tongue-in-cheek subtitle “What’s This Asshole Doing Writing a Book About Menopause?”, he writes:
I may not know what it’s like to be Mary Mudgett, but after thirty-nine years as a man in this world, in my darkest [thoughts], in the hardwired, misogynistic training I’ve received both concertedly and unconsciously … , I sure as shit know what it’s like to be a Damon Cross. To judge women for their youth, their solicitude, their convenience, their “use.”2
Cassidy skillfully uses his perspective to craft both Mary’s misogyny-infused internal monologue and also the external comments she gets from doctors, cab drivers, and even other women. His portrayal of self-criticism and being dismissed by others because of gender really resonates with me.
“Damon Cross was a great man,” she says in her upper register. “All great men have their imperfections. Great women learn to accept that, don’t you think?”3
Ick!! Oh my gosh?!
We all know these women though, don’t we? Women beaten down by society’s espousal of the “boys will be boys (and women will deal with it)” philosophy. As all good horror does, Mary takes a societal convention to the violent extreme and shows us where it lurks in the shadows of our own minds.
This could have very easily been a super depressing novel. Cassidy avoids this, however, by empowering Mary through teaching her to see herself, and to acknowledge the (literally) unseen women around her. Damon Cross defaced his victims in a clear act of patriarchal power and identity erasure. (Again, he literally de-faced them… he “skinned their faces.”4) Mary redeems these Jane Does’ identities as she works through the mysteries of the Cross House to identify them, and to figure out how she is linked to all of this.
Overall, I think the pacing of Cassidy’s sophomore novel, Nestlings, is better. Mary went on for a little too long, but I love Cassidy’s writing so much that it didn’t bother me all that much. I also think the narrative isn’t quite as clean as his second. The combo of internal and external horror meant we were chasing down two mysteries simultaneously; while they are linked, they are disparate enough that the conclusion wasn’t as satisfying as I think it could have been. These are all super minor critiques, and I honestly don’t know if I would have thought of them had I not read Nestlings first. For Nat Cassidy newbies, I recommend reading Mary first and then Nestlings.
Reading experience: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Literary style/“value”: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Overall rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Trigger/content warnings: violence against women, mental illness, verbal abuse, animal death, sexism, implied sexual trauma, bullying