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In this electric horror novel from the author of The Insatiable Volt Sisters, an exhausted mother thinks her newborn might be a monster. She's right.
Thea's third pregnancy was her easiest. She wasn't consumed with anxiety about the baby. She wasn't convinced it was going to be born green, or have a third eye, or have tentacles sprouting from its torso. Thea was fine. Her baby would be fine.
But when the nurses handed Lucia to her, Thea just knew. Her baby girl was a monster. Not only was Lucia born with a full set of teeth and a devilish glint in her eye, but she's always hungry. Indiscriminately so. One day Lucia pointed at her baby brother, looked Thea dead in the eye and said, "I eat."
Thea doesn't know whether to be terrified or proud of her rapacious baby girl. And as Lucia starts growing faster and talking more, dark memories bubble to the surface—flashes from Thea's childhood that won't release their hooks from her heart. Lucia wants to eat the world. Thea might just let her.
Crackling with originality and dark humor, Rachel Eve Moulton's Tantrum is a provocative exploration of familial debt, duty, and the darker side of motherhood.
"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...It's a disappointment." —Publishers Weekly
"Rachel Eve Moulton is a demonic doula, a midwife for monsters, and what she has delivered into this world is truly savage. Tantrum wails with vibrant life, an ouroboros of generational rage encased in scales and fangs. Yet another testament to Moulton's ascent as one of horror's most hauntingly provocative authors." —Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
"With humor and ferocity, Moulton pries open the powerful maw of motherhood, womanhood, and childhood, examining how the choices we make and are made for us can starve or sustain, can be a choking hazard or a feast." —Alice Carriere, author of Everything/Nothing/Someone
This information about Tantrum was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rachel Eve Moulton earned her B.A. from Antioch College and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Bryant Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, Southwest Review, New Ohio Review, Button Eye Review, and The Bangalore Review among other publications. Her debut novel—Tinfoil Butterfly—was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and nominated for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a Bram Stoker. Her second novel—The Insatiable Volt Sisters—was named as one of the top ten horror novels of 2023 by the NYT Book Review. She's spent most of her life as an educator, writer, and editor. She lives with her husband and two daughters in the mountains east of Albuquerque.
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