Necrology has my favorite book cover of the year (and that’s not something I say lightly, because this year has been full of great covers) and one of my favorite summaries of the year too. We readers moan and groan a lot about the inaccuracies of book blurbs and how misleading they can sometimes be, but the blurb for Necrology gives you the exact information you need to know to read this book and still manages to not give away anything that might spoil the best bits of the book. 

 

There are two powerful themes that inform a lot of what this novel is about: one, that men are angered by and fear the fact that women were born with innate magic; and two, that the worst thing a woman can do is turn her back on other women. The former forms much of the bedrock for the story while the latter forms much of the framework for the plot. The story is told in dual third-person POVs: Rabbit and Whitetail. Rabbit is an eight-year-old orphan in Whitetail’s charge at the beginning of the book, before events in the book cause their paths to diverge. From that point we see the events of the book through their vastly different sets of eyes. 

 

Survival. Autonomy. Identity. Freedom. Both Rabbit and Whitetail are fighting for these things, but they have to fight for them in different ways and it provides for an interesting and heartbreaking compare and contrast in narrative. 

 

Look, it’s hard to review this book in some ways because a lot of it is atmosphere and vibes. I kind of feel how someone receives this book will be a really subjective experience dependent on their outlooks on femininity, motherhood, childhood, community versus individuality, sisterhood, war, and pain. It may go even deeper than that. Meg Ripley dug deep and touched on some of the most vulnerable aspects of being a woman, and that’s a large part of both the appeal and the horror of this book: by so bolding exposing where we’re soft, hard, light, dark, and dirty she’s also showing readers what kind of horrors have always (and continue to be) perpetrated against us for being female while also telling us the answer through this wonderful story about women and the dormant beasts within them. 

 

File Under: Dark Fantasy/Feminist Horror/Folk Horror/Literary Fiction/Occult Fiction