Menopause is already horrifying enough without adding ghosts, a serial killer, and the possibility that you might be completely losing your fucking mind. Mary takes a middle-aged woman who has spent most of her life being ignored and overlooked, sends her back to the hometown she desperately wanted to escape, and then lets decades of anger, shame, and resentment turn into something absolutely monstrous.

Mary is almost fifty, newly fired, and suddenly experiencing some deeply concerning changes. She can't look into mirrors without passing out. She's seeing mutilated women who nobody else seems able to see. Strange words appear when she writes without thinking. And underneath all of it, she has this growing sense that something inside her is waking up.

After losing her job, Mary returns to her hometown in Arizona to live with her aunt, and things somehow get even worse.

I LOVED Mary as a protagonist because she is so deeply uncomfortable in her own existence. She's awkward, lonely, angry, insecure, and painfully aware of how invisible she's become to the people around her. She isn't secretly waiting to reveal that she's been a badass this entire time. She's spent years making herself smaller.

Watching that begin to change is where this book gets really interesting.

The way Cassidy connects Mary's menopause to the horror worked so well for me. Her body is changing in ways she doesn't completely understand, everyone around her is ready to dismiss what she's experiencing, and even Mary can't decide whether something supernatural is happening or she's simply losing control of herself. That uncertainty makes some of the earlier horror genuinely unsettling.

And then there are the ghosts.

The imagery in this book is fucking NASTY. Mary is surrounded by mutilated women connected to an infamous serial killer from her hometown, and the deeper she digs into their deaths, the more her own history starts becoming tangled with his. I loved the mystery surrounding that connection and how increasingly bizarre everything became.

But what really stuck with me was the anger underneath it all.

Mary has spent her entire life being taught that women like her are supposed to disappear quietly. She's too old to be desirable, too strange to be taken seriously, too timid to demand attention, and too accustomed to being ignored to realize just how angry she actually is.

This book basically asks what happens when that woman finally realizes being invisible can also make you dangerous.

I did think the book was a little long. There are sections where Mary's internal monologue becomes repetitive, and the middle occasionally slowed down when I wanted the mystery to keep moving. At over 400 pages, I think tightening some of that would have made the final descent into absolute insanity hit even harder.

But when Mary finally goes there, it GOES THERE.

By the end, this becomes much bigger, bloodier, and stranger than the book I thought I was reading at the beginning, and I had a great time watching Mary become increasingly difficult to recognize as the quiet woman we started with.