Jason Pettus's Reviews > Nightbitch

2022 reads, #20. It occurs to me as I begin this maddening review of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch that for me as a straight male to call it disappointing, since I had been led to believe that it was going to be a clever and unique darkly surreal horror tale (because of having it algorithmically recommended to me officially one bazillion times while I was reading the similarly darkly surreal horror tales The Doloriad and A Touch of Jen last month), just to discover that it's merely another mediocre MFA novel about how tough middle-class women have it (no, really, guys, they do), is a lot like that moment in The Simpsons when Mr. Burns says, "I don't know what 'misogynist' means, but no women allowed!" That's because this hugely popular cult novel and soon to be Hollywood feature is pretty much male-critic-proof from the start, in that every single word of its 238 pages is about all the ways life turns to shit for one milquetoast youngish creative classer after finally having a baby, and that it's largely the penis-owners in her life who are the cause of it, including her constantly absent husband and the unrepentant douchebag known as her toddler son. In fact, you could say that a new mother who's not getting enough sleep under such circumstances can turn into A REAL ANIMAL, ha ha, am I right folks, am I right? which feels very suspiciously like where the idea for this entire book came from, by Yoder losing her shit once at three in the morning around her screaming newborn and her husband remarking, "Wow, you turn into a real animal when you haven't gotten enough sleep," and Yoder suddenly stroking her chin and saying, "Wait a minute..."

That's a clever concept for a short story, I admit, the idea of the constantly repressed temper of a young frustrated mother eventually manifesting as a literal transformation into a violent, furious dog-creature; but like so many MFA authors from a short-fiction background trying to make the transition into full-length novels, Yoder didn't seem to actually know what to do with these 300 blank pages that were staring at her while she was tinkering around with the story idea, so in typical MFA fashion we just instead have only the original short story's worth of actual storyline, the author trying to make up for the rest with very pretty prose and roughly 75,000 words of minutiae about what the life of a youngish urban creative classer new mother is actually like -- the endless errands and acceding to demands, the never-concluding zombie sessions with other new moms at playgrounds and library storytimes, the trips to the grocery stores that can never just be a simple positive experience but must always, always blow up into tears and an angry crisis. There's nothing wrong with liking books that are about that, and I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm not trying to deny that, that anyone who wants to read a feminist-forward social-realist tale about the true headaches and nightmares that come with trying to simultaneously be a mother, wife, and theoretically earning career worker is more than encouraged by me to find, read and enjoy these books. But goddamnit, I was promised a fucking surreal horror novel, AND I NOW WANT THE FUCKING SURREAL HORROR NOVEL I WAS PROMISED, not some cleverly written "meditation" on how gently miserable all middle-classers are, which a bunch of ivory-tower eggheads are now gushingly calling a "horror novel" to their buddies like me just because it contains about the lightest touch possible of magical-realism elements needed to still be called a magical-realism story.

This is always the danger of accepting recommendations for genre novels from indie-lit hipsters, that a certain percentage of them have no idea what they're talking about and are just spouting a bunch of nonsense about genres that's not actually true; and while I found the chances in my favor when it came to people recommending The Doloriad and A Touch of Jen to me, here the peanut gallery simply struck out by recommending so passionately a "well-done horror novel" that was neither horror nor well-done. A disappointment, although certainly I agree with all the things she says about how difficult modern motherhood actually is, and I admire her for at least trying to take a new approach at telling such a story. A big swing here, but unfortunately a big miss in my opinion, although Goodreads is clearly showing that I'm in the minority when it comes to this mindset.