Afterbirth

An unsettling, hypnotic descent into the visceral heart of “mommy horror,” Afterbirth is a story of fractured sisterhood, aching hunger, and irrevocable transformation—reverberating with the echoes of classic horror cinema.

In the wake of a fraught and ill-omened romance, Brooke arrives in Vancouver to care for her sister Izzy, who is preparing to undergo reproductive surgery. But Izzy’s rapidly decaying apartment building, its hallways stalked by an ominous figure known only as Medusa, offers little of the refuge the sisters need.

Seeking solace in the horror movies her ex-girlfriend loved, Brooke soon finds traces of horror bleeding from the screen into their lives. Old wounds reopen and new tensions surface. When Brooke begins to exhibit strange symptoms of her own, the line between self and sister blurs, and their concern for each other twists into a tangled obsession.

Eerie, threaded with yearning, and startlingly original, Emma Cleary’s haunting literary debut explores loneliness, motherhood, and the body’s threatened autonomy. The novel blooms with the dark desires we suppress or surrender to—until only one question remains: who, or what, will survive when all unravels?

Emma Cleary is a writer from Liverpool who now lives in Vancouver, where she serves as editor-in-chief of Geist magazine. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Best British Short Stories, James Baldwin Review, and Canadian Literature, among other publications. She holds a PhD in literature, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Afterbirth (published in the UK as Our Monstrous Bodies) is her first novel.