Epeolatry Book Review: Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin

“Every sunset since I was ten years old has been for her. This one’s for me.”

The haunting phrase, “No extracurriculars” sums up this ruthless novel that grounds the familiar concept of vampirism-as-virus firmly within the stifling, all-too-familiar walls of pandemic lockdown.

We have no idea who the real Mia is, because she doesn’t; having been suspended for thirteen years in fight-or-flight mode. Stunted by curfews (sometimes legal, sometimes by tacit agreement), protected by precaution and routine, twenty-three-year-old protagonist Mia has been surviving in a liminal state, cutting herself off from anything and anyone outside her relationship with her mom. Her fierce wariness feeds her own isolation; symptomatic of the chokehold that sustained abuse continues to hold over her. It’s always easier to ignore a red flag from inside your situation, and while facing the bleakest violence Mia fights relentlessly between the urge to protect her mom, and the need to protect herself.

“The same thing that might kill me out in the desert could kill me at the kitchen table.”

Now, Mia is forced to confront the suppression of her own agency as she starts to discover her first glints of desire and, later, hope. Told in first-person in dual timelines, the present is ripped through with flashbacks to the year Mia turned ten and her mom turned. Safety and comfort are entirely relative to that knife’s edge of threat that stalks her through the novel, and the tension doesn’t let up.

It’s a terse, punishing thriller that grips you by the throat and forces you to watch the events unfold with dread from the very beginning. While Mia has time to reflect on her situation, her encounters and what led her to all this, there’s the feeling that something else, outside of her control, is also simmering. With simple, direct language and a setting that feels current up to the minute, it says just enough and the weight is felt.

The big question at the heart of this book is “Why do survivors of abuse stay so long, and what is it that pushes them to finally leave?” There’s the obvious answers: love and support, respectively. But with the paranormal heightening of a world where it’s already dangerous for women and girls to exist, these bonds are stretched beyond imagining at both ends, posing a hellish dilemma. What else do we have, and without them, who are we?

Often too real, the book’s themes of panic, paranoia and isolation are whipped up through the perfect storm of domestic abuse festering behind safety protocols. You can never rest on what you know to be safe, because it can turn on you any minute, and the storytelling effectively keeps you on the edge of your seat/knife/night, believing this wholeheartedly. Given this focus, it does make for a strenuous read if you’re entering it with any lived experience of abuse. The nuances drawn out of this exploration will be worth it for some, but don’t go without lining your stomach. 

You might like this if you liked the fraught mother-daughter dynamic of Carrie or Byzantium.

Content warnings are many (see the title’s page on StoryGraph for further details), but the main and most graphic ones are child abuse, pandemic and violence.

/5

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.