Femme Feral
Ellie is counting the days to her boss’s retirement, when he’ll finally hand over the reins of the meditation app company they built from the ground up. After all, she’s running the place already. And she deserves something positive after taking care of her older father-in-law and teenage daughter with little help from her way-too-easygoing husband. Plus, she’s having trouble sleeping, running hot and feeling emotionally volatile, which her doctor assures her is normal for a woman in her 40s. But after her boss brings in a male tech whiz as CEO instead of promoting Ellie, these symptoms intensify. Is waking up naked and covered in blood a typical perimenopause experience?
In Femme Feral, the first adult novel from screenwriter and YA author Sam Beckbessinger, “the change” becomes a physical transformation. Ellie is growing claws—literally—and every 28 days she wields ferocious strength and speed, powers that seem to unlock the anger she’s tamped down for years. The question becomes, what will she do with it?
Beckbessinger, who has written novelizations of Marvel’s Jessica Jones series, is no stranger to action and unafraid of gore. Ellie’s journey is visceral and violent, as quests for freedom often are, and Beckbessinger is clever when it comes to leveraging lycanthropy as a metaphor for menopause. Femme Feral is a reminder that it’s always a good time to embrace your true self, even if that self is a little bit monstrous.
Molka
A Peeping Tom crosses paths with a woman who’s tired of playing the victim in Monika Kim’s eerie Molka. Monitoring and setting up the security cameras in his workplace is part of the job for Junyoung, an IT technician in Seoul, South Korea. But the hidden camera, or molka, in the women’s restroom is definitely not an official installation. Junyoung loves being able to see his co-workers when they don’t know he’s watching, especially the women who are dismissive of him.
His co-worker Dahye, however, has always been kind and seemed to actually see him. Unfortunately for Junyoung, she’s obsessed with wealthy playboy Hyukjoon. When a video of Dahye and Hyukjoon having sex ends up hitting a molka forum—where voyeurs share videos—Hyukjoon abandons Dahye, setting off a cascade of catastrophes for everyone in Dahye’s orbit.
Though Molka can read more like literary suspense than a standard horror novel, its slow-but-steady pace creates a deliciously foreboding atmosphere. Kim, the author of The Eyes Are the Best Part, is a second-generation Korean American, and she weaves Korean folklore into the story as Dahye catches glimpses of the ghost of her sister, who died by suicide after the man who got her pregnant refused to marry her. The detailed portrayal of Seoul and the specifics of Korean misogyny—the molka forums, the note on Dahye’s personnel file that reads “Young and unmarried, but likely to leave for family planning soon. Long-term prospects are unlikely.”—grounds the novel in realistic details. Fans of the film Promising Young Woman and the works of Mo Hayder shouldn’t miss this one.
★ We Dance Upon Demons
Burnout is difficult to avoid in the year 2026, and if you’re working in an abortion clinic, burnout might be the best-case scenario. Depressed and dejected in a post-Roe world, Nisha sometimes feels she can’t take another morning of pushing through crowds of protestors even as the ways the clinic can help women are increasingly restricted. “There is no rock bottom, only the molten core of the earth,” she thinks. On her lunch break, Nisha pops into the Chicago Art Institute and has a supernatural encounter with her favorite Hindu statue. Soon, she is seeing demons no one else can, one of whom says she’s stolen some of his power. As angry gods join the angry protestors outside the clinic and threaten the people and places Nisha most wants to protect, she must distinguish antagonists from allies and faces increasing danger.
Vaishnavi Patel’s first three novels featured more traditional takes on Hindu mythology, but in We Dance Upon Demons, she weaves that mythology into the present day in a way that amplifies the story’s themes and allows Nisha to better understand herself. The scenes at the abortion clinic are based on Patel’s own volunteer experience, and depict the gritty realism of life on the front lines of health care, including workers’ frustration and, at times, despair. But like Pandora’s box, the conclusion holds hope amid the horrors.
Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die
Women teaming up to exact revenge on a cheating man may not be a fresh plot (John Tucker Must Die, anyone?) but it sure is immediately gripping. Mallory Arnold’s addition to this oeuvre, Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die, is a rewardingly wild ride. Nora, Ruby and Cham are horrified to discover that they are dating the same man. For years, they’ve loved Jason and given him whatever he needs—money, tools, even a kidney. The police won’t step in to recover the lost goods, so revenge it is. Ruby has access to a remote cabin outside Bozeman, Montana, and they all know what a scaredy-cat Jason is. Putting the fear of god into him might not be full restitution, but it’s something. “I’m sick of men just . . . getting away with whatever they want,” says Nora.
Arnold loses no time kicking off her gory thrill ride, set on a snowcapped mountaintop that may not be as uninhabited as it first appears. From page one, readers know that the plan has gone off course, since chapters charting the main action are intercut with transcripts of police interviews with Nora, Cham and Ruby. Cults, kidnappings, double-crossing and bloody rituals are just a few of the elements that Arnold combines in a tale that’s too action-packed to put down. The revenge theme gets a little lost in the sheer amount of action and complex character backstories, but it soon becomes clear that the friendship among the women is Arnold’s main focus. If living well is the best revenge, living well with friends is even sweeter.