A review by cherrykois
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

dark

4.0

Powerful and uncompromisingly uncomfortable as the title suggests,  this debut novel depicts an exhausted and infuriated young mother who is either having a psychotic break or legitimately experiencing herself turning into some sort of canine-human hybrid. Her body hair is growing coarse, her teeth are sharpening, she’s craving raw meat, and she’s feeling the urge to run naked through her neighbors’ muddy yards at night and howl at the moon. She kills wild rabbits and even her pet cat,  in one particularly gruesome moment. Or maybe, none of those things are happening anywhere outside her head. It’s American Psycho crossed with  Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

The story artfully maintains the tension of that ambiguity, while tapping into a lot of uneasy truths about modern parenting and expected gender roles. I hope to never feel a fraction of the rage and resentment this nameless protagonist carries for my partner or future children, but her grievances are legitimate against a society that demands so much of mothers by default and gaslights us all into believing that’s normal.  Raising a kid today can sometimes seem unspokenly draining and isolating no matter how dearly you love them, and author Rachel Yoder channels that knowledge into white-hot feminist fury.

Certain parts of this text are more engaging than others; the satirical multi-level marketing element is a bit broad for my tastes, and I  get extreme secondhand embarrassment from the rambling emails that the heroine sends to a professor whose book she happens across in the library. But the odd premise never slips into camp as it so easily could, and the core of the work expresses righteous indignation on behalf of parents that we don’t see often enough in our culture.