Tag: Patriarchy

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Eve by B.K. O’Connor: A feminist Paradise Lost retelling that leaves little room for mystery

Mandy Webster

What happens when the first woman refuses to stop asking why? In Eve by B.K. O’Connor, releasing February 10, 2026, the biblical mother of humanity is reimagined through a very explicit 21st-century feminist lens, one that trades subtlety for certainty as it follows Eve’s restless journey beyond Eden and across the ancient world.

Get your copy of Eve from my independent online bookstore today!

O’Connor’s novel begins close to familiar territory. The early sections largely mirror the biblical story, with one major deviation: Eve’s romantic attachment to Lucifer, who is framed not as a villain but as the first figure willing to question God’s opaque and authoritarian plan. Adam, by contrast, is portrayed as passive and incurious, content to remain in Eden forever, never wondering what lies beyond or what purpose existence might serve. Eve, meanwhile, cannot accept faith without understanding. She wants answers, not obedience.

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Writers on Writing

Valley of the Bees: The novel I wrote in 16 days—and the story that refused to end

Mandy Webster

Valley of the Bees is the book that taught me I could actually finish a novel—or at least something very close to one. I wrote it right after finishing my creative writing graduate program, at a moment when I had plenty of ideas, plenty of ambition, and absolutely no completed long-form fiction to show for it.

Get your copy of Valley of the Bees from my independent online bookstore today!

Up to that point, I considered myself a pantser. I wrote by instinct, followed my curiosity, and trusted the story to reveal itself as I went along. The problem was that nothing ever made it to the end. Clearly, my preferred method wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go.

So, I set myself a challenge.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot: Grief, motherhood, and the quiet violence of being blamed

Mandy Webster

No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot is one of those novels that quietly proves how wrong first impressions can be. I’ll admit it: I almost passed this one by because the cover looks oddly amateurish, the kind of design that suggests something lightweight or underbaked. I’m genuinely glad I didn’t. What’s inside is a sharp, unsettling literary debut that digs far deeper than its packaging suggests.

Get your copy of No One You Know from my independent online bookstore today!

Set in the Hudson Valley, the novel opens on what looks like a carefully curated life. Kate is a successful realtor and momfluencer with a devoted husband, Ethan, and a close relationship with her teenage daughter, Indie. That surface-level perfection shatters when Indie’s best friend, Maddy, is killed by a drunk driver right in front of her. From that moment on, Tourtelot is less interested in the tragedy itself than in the slow, corrosive aftermath—the way grief destabilizes families, marriages, and entire communities.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer: A ferocious horror novel about motherhood, patriarchy, and the cost of being “good”

Mandy Webster

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer is a horror novel that knows how to tell a gripping story while quietly dismantling the cultural myths propping it up. Scheduled to release on February 10, 2026, it’s the rare book that makes you start mentally planning your year-end “best of” list before you’re even finished reading. Trad Wife is an unsettling, deeply intelligent literary thriller that uses horror not just to disturb, but to say something urgent about womanhood, motherhood, and the performance of femininity in the age of social media.

Get your copy of Trad Wife from my independent online bookstore today!

Camille Deming presents herself online as the ideal #tradwife: cooking from scratch, tending her homestead, centering her life around her husband and home. The problem is that she’s missing the one thing her followers—and the ideology she’s bought into—demand most: a baby. When Camille discovers a mysterious well behind her farmhouse and makes a wish, her desire is answered in ways that are grotesque, intimate, and impossible to undo. Her pregnancy brings skyrocketing engagement and validation, even as her body begins to change in frightening ways and her marriage quietly continues to rot.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

What boys learn: A tense, unsettling dive into the stories we tell about boys, mothers, and the damage we inherit

Mandy Webster

When harmful behavior can be traced to both inherited traits and toxic social conditioning, how do we decide what someone is accountable for—and what they never had a fair chance to escape? In What Boys Learn, Andromeda Romano-Lax drops readers straight into a suburb reeling from the deaths of two teenage girls—an event that quietly but steadily unravels high school counselor Abby Rosso’s sense of safety, certainty, and trust. As whispers begin to circle her son, Benjamin, Abby finds herself confronting the possibility she’s spent years refusing to consider: that the child she loves might be capable of terrible violence.

Get your copy of What Boys Learn from my independent online bookstore today!

The novel builds its tension through the push and pull between nature and nurture, a question Abby can’t escape. She recognizes in Benjamin flashes of the same coldness and manipulation she once saw in her brother—signs she’s tried to explain away, signs she hoped wouldn’t repeat themselves in the next generation. But Benjamin’s childhood looked nothing like the one she and Ewan endured. If something darker is taking root in him, Abby wonders whether it comes from genetics, from the world around him, or from the places in her parenting where she turned away instead of looking closely.

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Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Mother Monster/Father Fiend

Mandy Webster

Elderfly Press is now accepting submissions for Mother Monster/Father Fiend, a new anthology exploring the shadowed edges of parenthood. We’re looking for short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and black-and-white artwork that reveal the monstrous, misunderstood, or mythic aspects of motherhood and fatherhood.

This anthology invites you to challenge the cultural scripts of what a “good” parent looks like. Sometimes the monster is real—a parent whose choices hurt, haunt, or unravel the lives of those in their care. Other times, the monster is only a mask placed by society:

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Listen by Sacha Bronwasser explores who gets seen—and who gets silenced

Mandy Webster

Sacha Bronwasser’s Listen is a quiet, unsettling novel that stares straight into the power imbalance between those who look and those who are looked at—and asks what happens when the powerless finally start to speak. Translated from Dutch, Listen unfolds slowly, like a photograph coming into focus, until the image becomes both vivid and painful.

Get your copy of Listen from my independent online bookstore today!

The novel moves between Paris and the Netherlands, between 1989 and 2015, tracing two women—Eloise and Marie—whose lives briefly overlap through the same family and the same Paris apartment. Both arrive as au pairs, both nearly invisible to the family they serve, and both find themselves noticed at last only when that attention becomes dangerous.

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Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Be My Weird/Wyrd Valentine

Mandy Webster

Love has always had a dark side—and we want to see yours. Elderfly Press is now accepting submissions for Be My Weird/Wyrd Valentine (working title), an anthology exploring the uncanny, unsettling, and sometimes downright horrifying side of romantic relationships.

We’re looking for stories, poems, essays, and black-and-white art that dive into the strange corners of love and desire—where passion turns perilous, intimacy hums with unease, and devotion blurs the line between beauty and terror. Whether it’s romance that defies reality, affection tinged with dread, or longing that transforms into something unrecognizable, we want work that lingers in the mind and twists the heart. Let the strange, the eerie, and the passionate collide—show us the love that frightens, bewilders, and enthralls.

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Call for Submissions

Now accepting book-length submissions

Mandy Webster

At Elderfly Press, we are committed to publishing bold, literary works that unsettle, provoke, and linger long after the final page. We seek book-length fiction and creative nonfiction that confronts the hidden violence of the world—psychological, social, or supernatural—and gives voice to stories that challenge the patriarchal status quo.

We are especially drawn to:

  • Literary thrillers and suspense novels with a sharp edge.
  • Horror fiction that unsettles through atmosphere, voice, or psychological depth.
  • Creative nonfiction—including memoirs—that could be read with the intensity of a thriller or horror novel.
  • Works that expose the dark underbelly of the patriarchy, pulling back the veil on power, violence, and survival.
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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Something in the Walls by Daisy Pearce is a haunting #spooktober thriller that cuts deep

Mandy Webster

Daisy Pearce’s Something in the Walls is the kind of book that makes you glance over your shoulder while reading. Equal parts folklore horror and psychological suspense, it delivers a chilling blend of witchcraft, mob mentality, and small-town secrets that feel both timeless and terrifying. If you’re looking for a gripping #Spooktober read, this one absolutely delivers.

Get your copy of Something in the Walls from my independent online bookstore today!

The story follows Mina, a young psychologist still finding her footing, who takes on the case of Alice Webber, a troubled thirteen-year-old girl in the remote village of Banathel. Alice insists she’s haunted by a witch, and her symptoms grow more alarming as the days pass. Mina, desperate to prove herself and help the girl, joins forces with journalist Sam Hunter. But Banathel is a place steeped in superstition, and the villagers have their own brutal methods of “dealing with” witches. The deeper Mina digs, the more dangerous the truth becomes—especially as echoes of her own past begin to surface.

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