Nightbitch

Rachel Yoder wrote an unusual story that’s close to a thriller and to magical realism—about a woman experiencing postpartum depression and expressing it in the most unexpected way. If Franz Kafka were a woman and lived in our time, he would have created something similar. Rachel Yoder skillfully works with irony, drama, and satire and knows perfectly where black humor is appropriate and where raw emotions should come through. You can approach this book in different ways, but—applause for its imagination and boldness. When she called herself a night bitch, it was harmless self-irony—because that’s what she was: a woman with a sense of humor, able to laugh at herself. But soon after that, she noticed a strip of harsh black hair at the base of her neck and asked herself—what the hell? “I think I’m turning into a dog,” she told her husband a week later when he returned home from yet another business trip. He laughed; she didn’t.

“She didn’t want to think—only to act. Only to survive. She growled and blindly threw herself into the crowd of bodies around her, searching with her teeth for flesh. She was all fur, blood, and bones. She was all instincts and rage.”

“An anger-filled story with loneliness and deliberate vulgarity. Savoring the deconstruction of the social script imposed on women, mothers.” — Publishers Weekly.