Elderfly Press

Introducing Mother Monster, Father Fiend: An Anthology of the Monsters Who Raised Us

Some monsters live under the bed. Others tuck you in at night.

I’m excited to announce the publication of my newest anthology, Mother Monster, Father Fiend: An Anthology of the Monsters Who Raised Us, edited by me and published by Elderfly Press. This collection has been a particularly meaningful project because it explores something that can be difficult to talk about: the ways the people who raise us can also hurt us.

We tend to think of childhood as a time of safety and parents as the people who are supposed to provide that safety. But families are complicated, and not every child grows up in a home where love is unconditional or protection is guaranteed. Sometimes the people who are supposed to nurture us become the source of our deepest wounds. Sometimes those wounds follow us into adulthood. And sometimes breaking the cycle means confronting what happened and refusing to let it define what comes next.

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Writers on Writing

Why fiction can be more powerful than nonfiction when we need to understand social issues

Facts matter. We need historians, journalists, researchers, documentaries, investigative reporting, firsthand testimony, and all the other forms of nonfiction that help us understand what actually happened in the world. Facts are essential. Without them, we cannot distinguish history from mythology, evidence from propaganda, or reality from the stories people tell themselves. But sometimes, facts aren’t enough.

Graphic: Why fiction can be more powerful than nonfiction when we need to understand social issues
Facts tell us what happened. Fiction helps us understand what it felt like.

Sometimes we can know a fact without really understanding it. We can know that human beings were enslaved. We can know that people were displaced from their homes. We can know that women living under oppressive governments lose rights and opportunities. We can know that war changes ordinary people’s lives. We can know that trauma can be passed from one generation to another. And yet we can still struggle to understand what any of those things actually mean to the people experiencing them. That is where fiction can do something extraordinary.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Strangers by Naomi Alderman: Grief, strange creatures, and a world that keeps moving

Naomi Alderman’s The Strangers is an unusual and deeply thoughtful blend of memoir and speculative fiction that uses the arrival of a mysterious new species to explore grief, human nature, and the unsettling realization that the world keeps going even when your own world has changed forever.

A few months after the death of her mother, novelist Naomi Alderman installs a wildlife camera in the garden of her parents’ home. What it captures is something no one has seen before: a strange, badger-sized animal with a flat face and a long, trunk-like nose. Soon these creatures, called mimmoths, are appearing everywhere. They spread across the United Kingdom and then around the world, seemingly without explanation. They don’t behave like ordinary animals. They won’t take food from humans, they can’t be captured, and they seem to possess an intelligence and purpose of their own.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm: A haunting story of home, memory, and inherited trauma

Some stories teach us about history by giving us facts. Others make us feel what it means to live through that history. Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm belongs firmly in the second category. This lyrical, unsettling debut follows three generations of Palestinian women as they confront the history of their family, the loss of their ancestral home in Haifa, and the supernatural consequences of a trauma that has never really been allowed to end.

It is a heart-wrenching story, but it is also an important one. There are some subjects that fiction can illuminate in ways that straightforward nonfiction cannot, because fiction allows us to inhabit the emotional reality of an experience rather than simply learning about it. Helm uses the conventions of the haunted-house story to explore displacement, cultural erasure, generational trauma, and the complicated meaning of home. The result is a novel in which the supernatural elements are disturbing, but the real-world horrors behind them are even more so.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Children of the Wolf by Abby Geni: A literary mystery about family, mythology, and inherited violence

Some families pass down recipes, heirlooms, and old photographs. Liv’s family passes down stories of gods, bloodshed, and a violent legacy she has spent her entire adult life trying to escape. Abby Geni’s Children of the Wolf, releasing September 15, 2026, is one of those novels that feels like an elaborate tapestry: dazzling threads in thousands of colors, each one carefully woven into the next until the final piece is something far more intricate and awe-inspiring than you could have imagined from the individual strands. At its heart, it is a story about loving a serial killer—and about whaeddt happens when the person you love turns out to be someone you should have feared.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that Liv’s father, Ulf, is a serial killer. The novel gives us enough clues to understand what is happening during Liv’s childhood even while Liv herself fails to recognize the signs until long after she has grown up and escaped her father’s control. And that distinction is important. Children of the Wolf isn’t really a story about discovering that Ulf is a killer. It is a story about what it means to have loved him.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Lady X by Molly Fader: A fierce, timely novel about female rage and generational rebellion

There are moments when a novel feels eerily timed to the world outside its pages. Lady X by Molly Fader is one of those books—a story that begins like a glossy domestic drama before transforming into something much angrier, more ambitious, and far more thought-provoking.

At first, I honestly wondered if I had picked up the wrong book. The present-day storyline introduces Margot Cooper, the seemingly perfect wife of a famous actor who has built a public image around traditional family values. It initially feels like the sort of suburban housewife thriller we’ve seen many times before: wealthy people, social media personas, carefully curated lives, and secrets waiting to explode. Then everything changes.

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Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes is a haunting Southern Gothic that demands to be felt

Some horror novels rely on monsters lurking in the shadows. Others understand that the most terrifying things are the systems people willingly protect. Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes, releasing June 9, 2026, is a Southern Gothic horror novel that understands this completely. Beneath its ghostly atmosphere and supernatural elements lies a brutal examination of generational trauma, misogyny, power, and the impossible expectations placed upon women to absorb suffering quietly so that everyone else can remain comfortable.

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Recently, I’ve seen discussions online asking readers to name books they’ve loved that were written by authors of color. Inevitably, there are always people who respond with things like, “I don’t pay attention to the race of the authors I read,” as though being “colorblind” is somehow the ideal approach to literature. But stories like Our Sister’s Keeper are exactly why intentionally seeking out voices different from our own matters. This is a novel that forces readers to confront lived experiences they may never have otherwise considered. It explores generational trauma, gendered expectations, institutional abuse, and the long shadow of racism in ways that feel both deeply personal and horrifyingly systemic. It’s impossible to walk away from this novel unchanged if you are willing to truly engage with what it is saying.

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Writers on Writing

If You Didn’t See It Coming: A psychological novel about family violence and the warning signs we ignore

A powerful psychological novel about domestic violence, generational trauma, and the warning signs we ignore. Amanda L. Webster shares the personal experiences behind If You Didn’t See It Coming and why fiction can reveal what statistics cannot.

If You Didn’t See It Coming is a psychological novel that explores domestic abuse, generational trauma, and the quiet warning signs that too often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Told through three interconnected perspectives, the story builds tension around a single, haunting certainty: someone is going to die. This isn’t a traditional mystery. It’s not about who did it. It’s about who will—and why.

Graphic that includes the book cover and a list of the following tropes: Multi-generational story, Domestic violence, Coercive Control, talks about the red flags we ignore. "You know someone is going to die-- you just don't know who-- or why."

The novel follows three generations of women—Marilou, Carrie, and Emma—each navigating her own version of control, fear, and survival. Marilou appears to have built the perfect life, but behind the façade is a marriage that has slowly eroded her sense of self. Carrie, her daughter, is doing everything she can to hold her life together after escaping an abusive relationship, only to have her ex forced back into her life through the legal system. And Emma, Carrie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, is caught in the middle—trying to make sense of attention, danger, and the complicated legacy she’s inheriting.

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The Children by Melissa Albert is a haunting story about the danger of becoming someone else’s myth

There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of growing up inside a story that never really belonged to you. In The Children by Melissa Albert, releasing June 2, 2026, childhood becomes both a performance and a prison as two siblings struggle to survive the legacy their mother built from their lives. The result is a darkly hypnotic literary fantasy that feels as though it’s flickering between reality and nightmare the entire time you’re reading it.

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Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe grew up as the unwilling inspirations for their mother Edith’s wildly beloved Ninth City fantasy novels. To the world, they were magical children adventuring through an enchanted realm. In reality, they were neglected kids growing up isolated in rural Vermont, half-feral and largely abandoned while their mother disappeared into the mythology she was creating around them. Albert builds both timelines—the children’s traumatic upbringing and adult Guin’s unraveling in the present day—with a sense of inevitable catastrophe. Every chapter feels like a countdown toward something terrible waiting just beyond the firelight.

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