Alice is heavily pregnant when she lets her boyfriend Pete convince her to move out to the Australian bush, and away from the ever stressful city. A rare condition called cutis has sprung up, which literally means someone's skin begins to seal over any orifice in the body - in the worst cases, people have died suffocated by their own skin. Alice has become obsessed with the illness, and inherently scared of anything that could cause harm to her body - be it the fear of the disease or chemicals from the plastic wrapped around food.

As the story progresses, Alice narrates her life in the Australian bush and the ever present feeling that something is wrong. However, as readers we can't tell if someone is actually wrong or is it Alice's obsessive fears making everything scarier than it really is. Are the evacuation orders really because of wildfires, or is it because of the dangerous skin-sealing disease?

Nothing really happens in this book, and for people really hoping for something short and snappy, the pacing of this book might not be 100% what you're looking for - despite the book itself being rather short. The book is slightly meandering as Alice flashes back and forth from her present to her childhood, and her relationships with both her mother and Pete. It once would have been hard to sympathise with Alice over her obsessive fear about cutis as she shares stories online, and freaks out about the smallest things yet we have been living in a pandemic for a year now so it's easy to see how such fear-mongering can happen - and how people can become crazy conspiracy theorists (5g anyone?).

The relationship between Alice and her unborn child is an odd one - as there's very little connection there or it seems at times that Alice is very distant from the child she's about to birth. Sometimes it's like she forgets there's even a life inside of her that's soon going to be out and depending on her.

There's some mild body horror in this, but I didn't find anything too bad until I was making lunch and Alice recalled the smell of an infected ear piercing - that was nice. So I wouldn't recommend this for meal times.

The birth scene in this book was as horrific and terrifying as you could imagine it might be, and all of Alice's fears are heightened to a point where it's hard to know what exactly is going. I've seen some reviews calling Alice silly and/or stupid for not recognising some elements of her pregnancy/birth but I took some of the lengths her mind takes her in her fear (which is due to a series of events that day) to be that - her fear playing mind tricks. So despite the horror of the scene, I enjoyed the intensity of the book.

The whole short novel delivered a great atmosphere and a heightening tension. There was always that uneasy feeling of things being wrong but not knowing what and the feeling that something was out there, just waiting.