There is one reference in Mary which is hard to miss; Stephen King's debut novel Carrie (1974), in which an oppressed and bullied young girl gains unexpected powers once her menstruation kicks in. Not that I really believe in solid good or evil; they are simply two symbolic extremes, and I dig a little evil in my literature. As a playwright, Nat is known as "one of New York City's rising playwrights, with numerous productions and awards, critical acclaim, and a reputation for producing intelligent, bold, darkly comic plays with one foot in horror and the other in literary allusion" (Usher Nonsense). In the split second before I react, I see the impression of eyes, of a mouth, the dented wetness of the gory fabric. I won’t spoil anything, but there were three vivid moments where I was fairly put off by what I was reading on the page, and one in particular where I almost stopped reading altogether.

So I ran to NetGalley and grabbed the titles I wanted that way, which works out just as well (and far more compact in terms of storage, really). I am a perimenopausal middle aged woman after all so I felt Mary was like a kindred spirit of sorts.Why do certain books grab my attention right away and keep me loyally in their hold until their endings?

Born in North Carolina, raised in Arizona, and currently residing in New York City, Nat Cassidy in an award-winning horror playwright, horror novelist, actor, and musician.

The final 10% of this book were pretty good, the other 90% was like a party that's not great but not quite bad enough to make me want to leave. I love the lady earlier saying "I didn't know we were doing children now" like wow nothing is too much for these people.

This scene of her skipping naked down the hallway and singing full of life that same song only now it has a WHOLE new and beautiful meaning. Without giving spoilers, this novel has some elements that would be challenging to pull off for many narrators, and Susan Bennett reads it beautifully. Mary is honestly not an interesting character, and I think we were supposed to root for her, similar to Carrie, but the whole book had me going what is going on now. With the titular Mary being an unremarkable woman in her late 40s, there's a constant compare and contrast between society's lack of expectation and desire for unmarried women in that age, and her gradual control and understanding over her supernatural power.I thought this was a novel about a woman who had suffered some trauma or breakdown in her life, now trying to cope with menopause and further emotional and physical upset.

And yet in spite of these numbers I won’t disclose, there were a few books I was hoping I’d pick up but were unable to obtain either because they weren’t there or the timing was off. While confronting both the bullies of her youth and the new cult that takes Cross as their prophet, Mary discovers that she may have a personal, past-life connection to the murders. The Author's Note at the beginning and the Afterword at the end pretty much say everything I was trying to *do* with this book--and the former also offers some spoiler-free content warnings if you'd like them.

This was gory and horrifying and had some images/scenes that will surely stick with me for a very long time. Disappointing because the opening line of “there’s a corpse in the bathtub” normally would have my FULL attention. This is a bad attempt to be the next Stephen King, the gratuitous violence is pointless, women enact more violence against each other than the men who have power, and the plot holes are as numerous as the specters.