Review of Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

“Women on daytime murder shows are always strangled or stabbed or chopped up for no reason at all, except that they’re women, I guess, and to some men that means they deserve it. Women are lucky to get shot, really. I’d rather be shot than strangled. Thank you, Son of Sam, you were uncharacteristically good to us.”

— Ainslie Hogarth

I had never heard of Motherthing before I saw it at the display in my local library, but when I brought the book to my work, my coworker who also reads said she had heard about it before. She also said it was a pretty popular book, which is why I was surprised that I had never heard of it before.

What had drawn me into the book was the cover and how it reminded of fifties horrors, and the comic book style was designed in a way that was pretty aesthetic. Some say they don’t judge books by their covers, but I definitely saw this book’s cover and went for it immediately.

Because I didn’t even read the synopsis, I was in for a wild ride. If you’re queasy and can’t handle elements of horror in your novels, Motherthing is not going to be the book for you.

I’m not delicate in the way that I cringe at certain things throughout books and movies, but this book had me wide-eyed in some sections, especially when the protagonist ends up eating her own period blood. That’s just one of many things that happens throughout this novel, so you have been warned if you haven’t read it already.

Onwards with the review!

After the suicide of her husband’s mother, Abby has to deal with the consequences professionally and personally.

At the very beginning of Motherthing, our protagonist, Abby, finds alongside her husband, Richard, his mother in a pool of blood inside their house. She has just attempted suicide, and when they reach the hospital, she ends up dying, leaving Richard in a downward spiral and Abby left to pick of the pieces of what’s happened to them.

The two of them had just moved into the same house as his mother, despite her obvious depression, to try and get closer with her as she ages, and Abby had hoped to fill a hole within herself by connecting with Laura. She didn’t have the best childhood and is in search of a mother figure, especially as she becomes pregnant in the novel.

With Laura’s death, Abby steals her ring and then tries to atone for what she did, although she hides the ring in a place where she knows her husband won’t find it. Richard’s grief goes beyond the simple “oh my god my mother died suddenly and killed herself” and he completely loses himself in despair.

Abby isn’t the biggest fan of this because he won’t even have sex with her anymore or react to anything, and she expects to just find him lounging about like a potato in a certain room. Naturally, she doesn’t react well to this, especially when she starts to go into the bathroom and ingest her own period blood thinking it’s her child.

At the same time, Abby has a favorite resident at the nursing home she works at, Mrs. Bondy. The two of them are fairly close, but when Mrs. Bondy’s daughter comes to visit her, Abby ends up snapping at the daughter about how she sucks as a daughter and kind of a person. Naturally, the daughter doesn’t react well to this.

By the end of the novel, she ends up transferring Mrs. Bondy out of the nursing home, leaving Abby completely and utterly alone, and Abby is completely devastated by the loss of someone she considered a friend—or perhaps another mother figure.

Everyone leaves Abby, but when the ghost of Laura keeps appearing back into her life to haunt her and Richard, it seems like she couldn’t get herself away fast enough.

Abby becomes convinced that her ghost is trying to take away everything she holds dearly, and because of it, she needs to make a plan quickly on what to do in order to save her husband and life. She ends up looking onto a cookbook from decades ago to find out the perfect recipe that claims to keep everyone in their life, and, as the novel progresses, she decides to visit a psychic and realizes she needs to feed him something very specific in order to keep her marriage alive.

At the end of the day, this is a novel about psychological horror. Abby clearly has something very much missing in her life—a mother—and the lengths she goes to preserve what she has can lead to some horrifying actions in herself. Although she wished for the death of Laura due to how she treated Richard, Abby has to deal with the consequences of not only Laura’s death, but also her actions as well.

Overall Thoughts

This definitely isn’t a novel for everyone, as I mentioned before. There’s a lot of disturbing content, placing this novel neatly into the category of psychological horror. I think it was very fascinating to read, albeit a bit difficult at times since I’m not used to this kind of content.

How far would one go in order to be loved the way Abby wishes to be loved? I think we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with her issues here, and the book was pretty easy to read outside of the specific horrifying details of what one does to achieve this.

But even outside of the horror elements, this is partially a tragedy—what’s happened to all of these characters is quite sad in the end. Lots of gender dynamics to pick apart when it comes to Abby, Laura, and Richard—I think I need to do a second reread to truly process what’s going on there.

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