Tag: Grief

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The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang is a haunting debut about grief, isolation, and the strange pull of belonging

Mandy Webster

Some novels hook readers with plot. Others cast a quieter spell, slowly wrapping themselves around your imagination until you realize you’ve been completely pulled under. The Jellyfish Problem blends magical realism, sea monster folklore, grief narrative, and literary mystery into an ambitious debut that will strongly appeal to readers who enjoy atmospheric, character-driven speculative fiction.

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Dr. Jo Ness is a marine biologist who has spent the last seven months barely existing after the death of her closest friend and collaborator, Aldo. Hidden away at a struggling aquarium, she immerses herself in jellyfish research and the unfinished field guide the two of them had been writing together. Aldo still exists in the margins of those pages through handwritten notes and observations, and Jo clings to them because she doesn’t know how to move forward without him. When Nadia—a woman Jo once loved during college—contacts her with stories about a giant glowing jellyfish off the coast of Maine, Jo seizes on the opportunity. Officially, she goes because of the creature. Emotionally, she goes because Nadia gives her a reason to leave her grief-stricken isolation behind, even if only temporarily.

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Author Interview

Author interview: Emily Persichetti Schuster on Beautiful and Terrifying, poetry, and writing through grief

Mandy Webster

In this contributor interview, poet Emily Persichetti Schuster discusses her work in Beautiful and Terrifying, the themes of grief and memory that shape her writing, and the creative process behind her deeply personal poetry.

Emily Persichetti Schuster writes with a quiet intensity, exploring grief, memory, and the fragile threads that connect identity, family, and place. Her work in Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny reflects a deep attentiveness to both the emotional and the everyday, drawing inspiration from poets like Marie Howe and Mary Oliver while carving out a voice distinctly her own. In this interview, she shares how early reading shaped her imagination, how she balances writing with the demands of daily life, and why poetry remains a powerful way to hold both individual moments and larger, unfolding stories.

Emily Persichetti Schuster, is a contributor to Beautiful and Terrifying.

Q: What’s a memory of a story or book that made you realize you wanted to be a writer?
A: Roald Dahl’s The BFG is the first book I remember reading completely on my own, when I was in early elementary school. I loved all Roald Dahl’s books when I was a kid, and I love reading them to my kids now. Through all the creepy, uncanny, and seemingly hopeless events of his books, the heroes always prevail because they’re never willing to give up. His books taught me to face my own fears and build resilience in the face of adversity.

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Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar: A piercing look at journalism, grief, and the stories we choose not to tell

Mandy Webster

The most unsettling part of Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar isn’t the violence—it’s everything that gets ignored in its wake. Releasing April 14, 2026, this literary novel follows foreign correspondent Rita Das as she chases the biggest story of her career in a war-torn Middle East, all while quietly unraveling under the weight of grief, guilt, and a life she refuses to apologize for.

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Rita is not an easy protagonist to pin down, and that’s precisely what makes her compelling. She is fiercely independent, deeply ambitious, and committed to living life on her own terms—even when those choices isolate her from nearly everyone around her. The double standard is impossible to ignore: if Rita were a man, her career-first mindset and emotional detachment would be praised. Instead, she’s judged at every turn, with only her late mother—a doctor who lived similarly on her own terms—offering any real understanding. That absence lingers, because grief is one of the novel’s most persistent undercurrents.

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Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh: A deliciously twisted game of obsession, grief, and control

Mandy Webster

Grief can make people do strange things—but in Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh, releasing March 31, 2026, grief is just the starting point for a psychological duel between two people who may be far more dangerous than they first appear. What begins as a chance meeting in a grief support group quickly turns into a tense, unsettling cat-and-mouse game where the real question isn’t whether someone is lying—it’s who’s manipulating whom.

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At the center of the story is Iris, a woman who is clearly out of touch with reality. She attends a local grief group to keep herself “grounded,” but from the start it’s obvious that Iris is holding onto far more than grief. Her childhood offers clues about how she became the person she is. Iris grew up in the shadow of her twin sister, Marcie—the golden child who their mother adored. Marcie’s birth came easily, while Iris reportedly took days to arrive, a story their mother never let her forget. Even after Marcie’s tragic death at seventeen, their mother openly wished it had been Iris instead. It’s the kind of emotional wound that never quite heals, and as an adult Iris is still searching for the love and validation she never received.

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Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen: Grief, bog bodies, and the quiet horror of what we carry

Mandy Webster

Grief doesn’t arrive on a schedule, and it doesn’t leave when it’s inconvenient. In Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen, an adult debut releasing February 17, 2026, that truth sits at the center of a haunting, lyrical novel about loss, memory, and the unsettling ways the past insists on being seen.

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Anna is a London-based novelist who can no longer write, eat, or sleep in any meaningful way. Her mother is slipping deeper into dementia, her father is already gone, and Anna herself is reeling from a recent loss so destabilizing it has fractured her sense of self. Still, her literary agent wants pages. Progress. A new book. So when a winter writer’s retreat in rural England offers “space,” Anna takes it—less to finish a novel than to escape her own mind.

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When going home means facing the ghosts you tried to forget: Do Not Follow by Surbhi Bansal

Mandy Webster

Returning home after years away can feel like stepping back into a life you no longer recognize. In Do Not Follow by Surbhi Bansal, that homecoming forces one woman to confront the choices, expectations, and silences that have shaped her entire life.

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Seema, once a promising surgeon, is now a consignment store owner living far from the path her family imagined for her. When her father dies, she returns to Albany after seventeen years to help her mother sort through their family home. What follows is a deeply emotional story about grief, identity, and the unspoken costs of cultural and familial duty.

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Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk sinks its fangs into grief, motherhood, and the hunger we can’t outrun

Mandy Webster

In this haunting Argentine gothic, the vampire isn’t a glamorous predator but a creature driven by instinct—feral, tragic, and devastatingly human. Marina Yuszczuk’s Thirst, translated by Heather Cleary, breathes new (undead) life into the vampire novel, weaving a queer, feminist narrative that shifts between 19th-century Buenos Aires and its modern-day counterpart. The result is an eerie and lyrical meditation on desire, decay, and the violent inheritance of womanhood.

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The novel opens with the vampire as a child, taken by her mother and given over to the man who will eventually transform her. From the beginning, Thirst is deeply concerned with the bond between mothers and daughters—and the ways that bond can be both protective and damning. In the present day, the unnamed narrator grapples with her own mother’s slow death while caring for her young son. Grief unmoors her, and she finds herself wandering the cemetery where she first encounters the vampire. What begins as curiosity blooms into obsession, desire, and something even darker.

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The Trap you won’t see coming: Catherine Ryan Howard’s masterclass in modern crime fiction

Mandy Webster

Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Trap is a masterfully crafted psychological thriller that deserves far more attention than its underwhelming cover might suggest. Inspired by the real-life disappearances of women in 1990s Ireland, the novel is as unsettling as it is propulsive, offering a chilling and suspenseful exploration of grief, obsession, and the desperate human need for answers.

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The story unfolds through three distinct perspectives: Lucy, a woman determined to catch her sister’s killer after her mysterious disappearance; Angela, a civilian working with the Irish police whose side investigation threatens both the case and her career; and a nameless predator whose terrifying narration will keep your heart pounding. These shifting points of view give the book its pace and emotional heft, and Howard moves between them with expert precision.

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What secrets lie behind the Midnight Door? Katrina Monroe’s haunting tale of sisterhood and trauma

Mandy Webster

What if the scariest thing isn’t what waits behind a mysterious door, but what happens when you never speak of it again? Katrina Monroe’s Through the Midnight Door is a genre-bending novel that slips between the psychological and the supernatural, the traumatic and the magical, all while anchoring itself in the emotionally raw terrain of sisterhood. It’s eerie and unsettling in the best way—but also heartbreakingly intimate.

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Years after the Finch sisters dared to unlock the doors in a seemingly impossible abandoned house in their dying hometown, the youngest, Claire, is found dead inside it. Her death pulls Meg and Esther—both estranged and damaged in different ways—back into each other’s lives. They’re not just grieving a sister; they’re unraveling what really happened that summer and what they never told each other.

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Why you shouldn’t sleep on Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree: A chilling debut about family, grief, and survival

Mandy Webster

What begins with a severed crow’s head and a haunting dream evolves into something far more layered in Bad Cree, Jessica Johns’ eerie and powerful debut. This genre-blending novel offers readers a gripping supernatural mystery while also digging deep into themes of grief, intergenerational trauma, and the quiet, often unseen strength of women supporting one another through pain.

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When Mackenzie wakes to find a crow’s head in her hands—only to have it vanish—she can no longer ignore the disturbing dreams that have been plaguing her. As her waking world becomes increasingly infected by her nightmares, she leaves Vancouver for her hometown in Alberta to reconnect with the family she left behind. At first, she fears the worst: her mother and sister are furious with her for skipping her sister Sabrina’s funeral. The stage is set for major emotional fallout—but instead of fracturing further, the women in Mackenzie’s family do something more surprising: they show up for each other.

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