Ghost Mother

• Author: Kelly Dwyer
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: August 6, 2024
• Publisher: Union Square & Co., audiobook by Dreamscape Media

Thank you to NetGalley, Union Square & Co., Dreamscape Media, and Angela Man for providing me with a copy of this ARC/ALC in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: infertility, miscarriage (graphic), grief, murder, suicide, death of a child, abortion

A mesmerizing psychological ghost story that blurs the thin line between reality and delusion—and a chilling tour de force that is unputdownable and unforgettable.

Lilly Bly desperately wants to have a baby. She is struggling with infertility and bad spending habits when her husband, Jack, lands a new job that moves them from Chicago to a small town in Wisconsin. Impractical Lilly falls in love with a decrepit mansion well out of their price range, certain this is where she’ll finally become a mother, and Jack reluctantly agrees to buy the wreck. But after Lilly learns her dream house was the site of a gruesome murder-suicide in the 1950s, she begins to experience strange occurrences, leading her to believe the house is haunted. Are her ghostly encounters real, or is this a cascading mental breakdown? The more Lilly learns about the deaths, the more she becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about the tragic crime. As her visions become increasingly vivid, her relationship with Jack deteriorates, leading to a dramatic and irreversible climax.

While I’m too much of a wuss for reading true horror, the idea of a psychological ghost story with gothic influences was one that piqued my interest and just sounded too good to miss out on. Plus, now that we’ve passed the halfway point of the summer, it’s just the right time to start reading my spooky season books as I wait for pumpkin spice everything to be available. 

The audiobook is narrated by Renata Friedman, and she was fantastic as the voice of Lilly. She kept me intrigued throughout the whole story, and even as I read along in the physical book, I could still practically hear Friedman’s voice narrating the story. 

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to stories that incorporate psychological elements into horror, thrillers, and mystery, mostly because the representation tends to veer into stereotypes and unrealistic portrayals. When we meet Lilly, she’s got a lot on her plate. She is the main character, and she’s been dealing with pregnancy loss and infertility, and she’s financially irresponsible. She comes across as a damsel in distress type; where she always needs someone to help her, and doesn’t really do much on her own. 

When Jack’s job transfers him, Lilly falls in love with a dilapidated mansion that’s more expensive than they can afford. She’s completely unreasonable, and really pushes Jack into buying this impractical wreck of a home. They’re both aware that the house is going to cost way more money to make habitable than they can afford, and Lilly agrees to get a job to help with expenses. But once they’re in the house, they discover the gruesome history in which there was a double murder and a suicide at the site in the 1950s, and Lilly starts to experience some unusual situations that she can’t explain.

I really struggled with Lilly’s character in the book. She’s an unreliable narrator, flighty and disorganized, and it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. This only gets worse as the story goes on, and unfortunately, it plays into the mental illness trope that includes such harmful representation that I dread to see in books. This could have been done much more successfully if the mental health representation was done in a more realistic way. It grew harder for me to like Lilly the further into the book that I read, and instead of getting more invested in the story, I found myself getting more distant.

Overall, this wasn’t one of my favorite stories. The line between delusion and reality wasn’t ever made very clear, so that we aren’t ever sure of what is actually happening. And the central premise of being in the house, Lilly having a baby while living there, isn’t a logical one. We don’t have any information as to why Lilly would think that things would be different for her in this specific house, especially when she’s been having such major fertility issues all along. Lilly also seemed really fixated on the most gory aspects of miscarriage and infertility, and it didn’t come across as realistic—if this is a sensitive topic for you, then this book probably wouldn’t be a good fit. But it might be a better fit if you do like unreliable narrators and don’t mind negative representation of mental health issues or the content warnings. 

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