Mothers & Other Monsters is domesticity redone through a science-fiction lens. McHugh runs to recurrent themes like a sore tooth: troubled adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, middle-aged women forced to care for someone ravaged by Alzheimer's. Fear, and love, and the ideals that people always fail to live up. She has some talent as a writer, except that she really struggles with endings. Her stories don't end, so much as close with a quick-jab to the solar plexus, a gasp of realization that it always was going to be that way, that everyone is trapped by their history.