Mother Knows Best

Overview

Blood binds. Mothers make. Children remember.

The connection between daughter and mother has long been tangled in blood. Creator and caretaker, protector and predator, the mother is expected to give everything of herself—her body, her identity, her hunger, her rage. But motherhood has always had teeth. From the womb to the grave, mothers shape us, scar us, shelter us, and sometimes swallow us whole. We fear becoming our mothers because, in ways both beautiful and monstrous, we already are.

From Margaret White in Stephen King's CARRIE to the monstrous mothers haunting contemporary horror, women have long used the genre to interrogate the darker corners of motherhood. The mother gives life, but she can also take it. She nurtures and neglects, protects and possesses, loves and devours. Horror gives us permission to look beneath the mythology of perfect motherhood and ask what happens when maternal love becomes something hungry—or when the women expected to mother everyone finally bare their teeth.

In a world where mama trauma can make a monster of us all, MOTHER KNOWS BEST explores the complicated, consuming bonds between mothers and their children. From mama trauma to smother mother, these stories dig into the guts of motherhood—its love and loss, sacrifice and resentment, tenderness and terror—to confront the scariest monster of them all: our mothers.

From award-winning editor Lindy Ryan comes MOTHER KNOWS BEST, an anthology of original stories and poems from women of contemporary horror who explore the monstrous side of motherhood and the bloody ties that bind. Featuring Rachel Harrison, Gwendolyn Kiste, Kristi DeMeester, Kelsea Yu, and many more, with an introduction by Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann.

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