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Dearest by Jacquie Walters

Horror

Dearest

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Jacquie Walters, on your first book!

by Jacquie Walters

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Quick take

Voices on the baby monitor, animated toys, creepy crawlers—motherhood’s hard, but has never been quite this horrifying.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Fast_Read

    Fast read

  • Illustrated icon, Unreliable_Narrator

    Unreliable narrator

  • Illustrated icon, Creepy

    Creepy

  • Illustrated icon, Mama_Drama

    Mama drama

Synopsis

Flora is a new mom enamored of her baby girl, Iris, even if she arrived a few weeks early. With her husband still deployed, Flora navigates the newborn stage alone. But as the sleepless nights pass in the loneliness of their half-empty home, the edges of her reality begin to blur.

Just as Flora becomes convinced she is losing her mind, a surprising guest shows up: Flora’s own mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken in years. Can they mend their fraught relationship? Or is there more Flora’s mother isn’t telling her about the events that led to their estrangement?

As stranger and scarier events unfold, Flora begins to suspect the house is not as empty as she once thought. She must determine: is her hold on reality slipping dangerously away? Or is she, in fact, the only thing standing between a terrifying visitor and her baby?

Content warning

This book contains scenes that depict suicide and the death of a child.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Dearest.

Dearest

Prologue

When Flora wakes, her mouth is so dry that the inside of her cheeks are stuck to her teeth. She carefully opens her jaw—POP!—and the hinge releases with a jolt of pain to her left ear. Her legs and torso are heavy, weighed down.

blankets

these are blankets

Flora is in bed.

She lies still, eyes darting for answers on the ceiling, and wills her brain to catch up to the present moment. When she tries to sit, her left shoulder screams a pulsing protest. She rolls onto her right side and pushes herself up with her palms. The room spins, and she closes her eyes to avoid hurling, though it might be inevitable given the hangover-like headache that pounds at her temples and tugs at her raw throat.

How did she get in this bed? She tries to remember. Needs to remember.

It’s there—the memory—surrounding Flora like a mist, escaping the fingers of her brain as they attempt to grasp it. A word traveling rapidly along synapses until it pops onto the tongue like a gumball landing in the cup of a machine.

water

so much water

She was in the bathroom. She had desperately needed a bath. Desperately needed to get clean. She was so dirty and so, so tired.

Crying. There was crying. She remembers pulling baby Iris into the bath with her.

Iris where is Iris

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Why I love it

“Maybe that is the burden of motherhood: to give all that you can and know that it will never be enough.”

Bringing life into the world and then trying to protect it from all the dangers lurking around us is scary business. In her debut novel, Dearest, Jacquie Walters renders early motherhood a horror as riveting and harrowing as any creature feature or zombie apocalypse.

Flora is a new mother solo parenting while her husband is deployed. The day to day grind has left her lonely, guilt ridden, and maddeningly bored. She hungers for company and some guidance as to how to navigate these motherhood travails. But her ordinary, though quite painful, desires begin to quickly morph into something stranger, scarier—visitations from a childhood imaginary friend, indecipherable dreams, and voices coming out of Iris’s baby monitor. Soon Flora is in a full-blown panic that her child may be in danger, so she seeks help from her own estranged mother. Unfortunately, this does not stave off the horrors and demons from the past that begin to mingle with those of the present, leaving Flora in doubt of her own sanity…

Don’t let the strollers or suburban homes fool you—this is a truly haunting novel. Dearest burrows deep into a parent’s greatest fears and animates them to thrilling effect. I had literal goosebumps. If you are looking for a unique spooky season read unafraid to get a little weird, pick this one up!

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