Our Monstrous Bodies: Emma Cleary
Our Monstrous Bodies is a haunting literary debut that blooms with the dark desires we suppress or to which we surrender.
Emma Cleary's debut is a genuinely unsettling exploration of sisterhood gone awry. Brooke arrives in Vancouver fresh from a failed teaching stint and romance in Japan, expecting to help with Izzy's dog during her sister's abdominal surgery. What she finds instead is a nightmare of neglect—an apartment with mould creeping across ceilings, garbage piling up, and an unhinged elderly woman named Marisa who materialises without warning to terrorise the building's residents.
What slipped under my skin was how Cleary uses horror cinema as more than just aesthetic window dressing. The way film tropes bleed into the sisters' reality creates this disorienting effect where you're never quite sure what's supernatural and what's the very real horror of women navigating medical systems that don't listen to them. The pressures around motherhood and what society expects from women's bodies felt uncomfortably familiar, even as the supernatural elements escalated.
My overall feeling reading this was like encountering some deeply disturbing modern Japanese folk horror—that same atmosphere of domestic spaces turning malevolent, bodies becoming sites of inexplicable transformation, and reality warping in ways that resist clear explanation.
While Cleary's prose is often gorgeous, there were moments where I wished she'd ease up. Just when the tension was reaching a fever pitch, an elaborate metaphor broke the spell. The similes sometimes felt like they were slowing us down when I desperately wanted to race ahead, but this is my read of a style which you may find compulsive, it's certainly beautifully crafted.
The scenes where everything goes really wrong are masterfully crafted. Watching Izzy's concern transform into something obsessive and boundary-crossing was genuinely chilling. The book asks difficult questions about care, control, and what we do when the people meant to protect us become threats themselves.
I'll admit I felt somewhat lost and the ending left me disoriented, though the unsettling atmosphere remained viscerally intact. It's an ambitious, uncomfortable read that doesn't shy away from the messiness of women's relationships with their bodies, each other, and the world. Not perfect, but definitely memorable.
Out March 12th £16:99
For more info or to order see the publishers website:
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