This was a very compelling read which I finished in one sitting.

This dark domestic horror story explores motherhood and the impact a mother can have as well as the desire to be loved.

I really enjoyed the authors writing style and the way really dark themes are handled with such wit.

I really could not have predicted the route the ending was going to take, but the book was definitely an enjoyable if slightly disturbing journey.

mother-in-law from hell!!!

abby and ralph have a ghost in their home and it’s not some cute, creepy lil victorian girl but ralph’s own mother. after her suicide, laura, comes back with a vendetta, to further keep ralph under her suffocating watch, plunging him into a deep depression and terrorizing abby and her marital life. abby has to act, and fast to keep laura from destroying her hopes of being a good wife and a good mother.

after a lifetime of not having a mother but instead having things that are mothers, MOTHERTHINGs, abby is determined to turn that around and be the best mother she can be. after laura’s death and ralph in the middle of depression, abby is confident that the only way she can save her husband is by cooking him delicious meals from her favorite cookbook and giving him a baby.

i found the theme of motherhood a strong presence in this novel, abby whole heartedly believes that a baby will save them as a couple and finally be happy and normal. as a sort of practice, abby works in a nursing home as a caregiver and she has a favorite resident. mrs. bondy. who she thinks of as her baby and vice versa, sometimes she feels as she is mrs. bondy’s baby, abby finally having a mother.

motherthing is smart, dark, bold, funny. ainslie hogarth created a masterpiece and achieved to easily blend horror with the domesticity of motherhood. with writing that is sharp and hypnotic i couldn’t put this down and had me captivated from the first chapter.

Abby just wants to be loved. After a traumatic mess of a childhood, she thinks she's found the security she craves with her husband, Ralph, but then they move in with his awful mother, Laura. After Laura takes her own life, she haunts the couple - sending Ralph into a deep depression and terrorizing Abby.

There were a lot of things I loved about this book. The cover killed it. The writing was smart and sharp and hilarious and disturbing. These were two of my favorite bits:

"Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they're just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through." BRUTAL.

"The work of women's clothes never more important than at the beginning and end of their lives when it's tasked with broadcasting, as loudly as possible: please don't try to have sex with me." (snort)

I do feel like it could have been a bit shorter and may have worked better as a novella than as a full-length novel because it got a little slow in the middle, but that ending... yuck and wow and gross and amazing.

i admit i asked for this purely based on the cover BUT i have been so very pleasantly surprised by it!!! the writing is so good and so raw and it really teeters that edge of direct wit and tongue in cheek humour. and the ending ??? so satisfying!!! and totally didn't see where it was going at any point, even when in my head i was like okay remember this part for later it'll probably be important when it did come round i was still shocked. really good!! would recommend!! :)

To start, I did enjoy the overall concept, a woman’s cruel narcissistic mother-in-law slowly begins to haunt her and her husband after she vindictively commits suicide. I know, I know, this does not sound fun in the least, but Ainsley Hogarth has a way of shining a black light of humor on the very real difficulties of growing up with a parent with bipolar disorder.

I struggle to review this one, because while I did enjoy the concept I just struggled with the writing style. Even though I really truly do enjoy crass humor, the first pages including a debate about fecal consistencies that goes just a few lines too far, was not a hit for me. I will say that the slow building dread was very well executed, I just never found myself fully engaged with the characters.

Thank you so very much to Netgalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for opportunity to read and review this title.

I read about half this novel. I kept pushing through in hopes it would speed up and something more exciting would happen. It did not.

Special thanks to Knopf Doubleday Publishing and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my own opinion.

Wow. Explaining a book in my review is not enough. I don't have to tell you what a book is about because I'm sure you read the cover jacket or what's it about. What I will say is .my thoughts.

This book started of fine, but it was not a HORROR, which got me a little put off. Horror should be scary, am I right? Nothing of importance happens and than I think Abby is an unreliable narrator or was she supposed to have mental illness and was this the way the author was going? I almost DNF. It wasn't terrible, it just very convoluted and chaos. I was expecting much more.
3 stars

Mothering by Ainslie Hogarth was true HORROR. Abby is planning to have a child sometime in the near future and came from a very traumatic childhood. All she wants to do is be settled with her little family. But her mother-in-law will not allow peace..

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth sounded like it would be right up my alley - horror with dark comedy. Plus, the plot sounded quite unique. Unfortunately, it just wasn't right for me in the end. Honestly, it wasn't what I was expecting and what it was didn't suit me. I wasn't into the stream of consciousness style or the lead character. I also don't think I would quite call this horror.

Thank you to Netgalley for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth is ‘mommy issues’ if they were a book. This kitschy and dark novel focuses on wife and husband, Abby and Ralph Lamb, who are reveling in the dreary aftermath of Ralph’s mother’s passing. Ralph’s mother committed suicide in their house and Abby wishes that she could have found love, affection, and validation from her before her tragic death. Ralph’s descent into an all-encompassing depression drives him towards unemployment while Abby desperately wants a child with him. Amidst all of the madness within their house the ghost of his deceased mother returns to haunt their residence.
Upon reading the intriguing synopsis and witnessing the beautiful campy cover reminiscent of vintage horror movies, I was very drawn to this story. Unfortunately, right off the bat I really disliked the forced “overly quirky” writing style. I really wanted to like this novel more than I did based on its description, but it truly just fell flat for me. I felt bored by the story at times and deeply struggled to connect to any of the characters, which is a big issue in a story for me personally.
I took issue with the inclusion of parts that seemed to only be weird for shock value, rather than to add any value or relevance to the overarching storyline itself. I felt at times that the book was trying to be something it’s not and was attempting to do so many things it sadly failed to accomplish. One thing in particular that I disliked was that the book is marketed as a “horror novel” but in attempts to pay homage to the genre, it reads more as a ‘half-baked horror story’ in my opinion. It features some vaguely ‘spooky’ parts but felt as if it were missing some key elements to truly qualify it as a horror novel. Although I did find some of the humor funny, there are only so many poop jokes one can handle until it’s just overdone.
I found this book to be unhinged, depraved, and disgusting at times. It really left me wondering “what am I even reading right now?” at certain scenes. One scene particularly that had me thinking this, was a part where a character was sexually assaulted and absolutely no consequences came of it. It felt problematic for the character to just accept it and do nothing about it and that message feels troubling to me. It also didn’t really seem like it needed to be included as a part of the storyline.
In my opinion, Motherthing was a book I most likely would have passed on. I do think that taste in writing style and diction varying in different authors is extremely subjective though, so readers could have vastly different takeaways from this book. I think that many people would absolutely love this book if the writing style was for them, but some people could dislike it as well. In my personal opinion, I wanted a bit more from this book, but I think readers looking for a festive Halloween book who enjoy this type of writing could potentially enjoy it.

This book is not my typical genre, but it's also not anyones typical genre because it's so out there. I don't know what I just read but it was certainly never boring.

This book was.... crazyyyyyyyyy.....

That is the only accurate word to describe this word vomit of a book...

Ralph and Abby move to Ralph's mothers house in order to take care of her and she suddenly commits suicide. We only get to see the perspective of Abby, who did NOT get along with her mother in law in the traditional sense. This meaning that she strives to make a relationship with her, but in the mother's eyes, only a mother can give Ralph the love he needs and Abby just isn't good enough.

At first it feels like the standard situation, but then as the story goes on, you see that Abby isn't the most sane person at the party. She is dealing with a LOT of childhood trauma that makes Ralph's mother rejection even more devastating. However, its not only that Ralph is not handling the situation all too well either.

This wakadoo world that the author has created lends to a deeply messed up plot that made me question my sanity and reread parts again and again.

The only reason I gave this book a four instead of a five was the ending.... I felt stupid because I didn't understand how we could go from that dinner tooooo that ending.

Mind is confused...

I tried so hard to finish this book but I just couldn’t do it and ended up DNFing at 57%. I love horror so I thought this would be a book that I really enjoyed but unfortunately it wasn’t very interesting and didn’t really feel like horror to me. I also didn’t care for Abby or Ralph and because of that, found it difficult to get invested in their lives and the story.

our jellied salmon loving protagonist Abby is my favorite kind of woman - unhinged! Hogarth is an author I definitely need to read more from, this gave me similar vibes to like Moshfegh (especially with all the bodily function descriptions). it took me a moment to get into the story, as its synopsis is quite misleading - the MIL dies at the beginning of the book, and the rest is just about the aftermath and Abby coming to terms with her own mommy issues.

I absolutely adored the cover art on this book, but the style of this one just wasn't for me. It's not a traditional horror novel, there is no creep factor or existential dread here. It's more literary horror if that is even a genre! It just wasn't the right book for me but would likely appeal to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Rachel Yoder.

This was one of my most anticipated releases of this year, and it mostly lived up to the hype. I loved the humour Abby wove throughout her narration, although I found her thought processes and and motives really frustrating sometimes.
I thought it was going to be scarier than it was, I guess the current theme of using mental illness as a horror plot line is quite popular but it didn’t really land for me.

Immensely clever and written with such careful detail, Motherthing is an absolute work of art and a standout in a sea of lifeless reads. It is so clear Hogarth has such a keen and observant eye regarding the world and how people operate. The entire story jumps off the page in such an exciting way and I would recommend this to anyone who can handle a little being a little squirmy.

Ainslie Hogarth's Motherthing is one wonderfully odd little book. On the surface, it's about Abby and Ralph, a happily married couple going through the unthinkable - the suicide of Ralph's mum.⁠

But nothing in this book is so simple. Even a tiny bit below the surface is ugly and twisted, steeped with hints of gothic horror on every page. ⁠
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Abby and Ralph bear the trauma of truly awful mothers. They come together and bond because of that shared experience. Abby feels they can do anything together - she saved him and he saved her. She doesn't see what the reader sees, that both of them are repeating the dysfunctional patterns they learned from their mothers.⁠
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Ralph is convinced his mother's spirit is still in the house and Abby can hear him having whispered conversations in the dark basement. There's a lot of creepy foreshadowing and the palpable tension grows increasingly unbearable as the story continues. You have no idea if Abby and Ralph are being haunted by Ralph's mother or if Ralph is slipping into mental illness. Abby, desperate to rescue him, begins to unravel as well. ⁠
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Abby is very much like a Barbara Comyns' heroine - naïve, matter-of-fact with an unflinchingly brutal honesty in her account of what's happening. I thought of Comyns' Who Was Changed Who Was Dead when reading Motherthing. It's filled with frightening and disgusting bits that are probably not for the squeamish.⁠
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But Hogarth interjects quirky humour throughout the horror with Abby's odd take on the world. I loved Hogarth's writing - a little Pomeranian hangs "like a colostomy bag" off the owner, and the funeral director "wears his flesh, hoisting and adjusting it like a child in his father's suit jacket."⁠
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I'm very thankful to NetGalley and Vintage Books for the advanced review copy of Motherthing. I loved this horrifying little book and would definitely read more of Hogarth's work. If you are a Comyns' fan or a lover of quirky horror, I highly recommend Motherthing.

This book starts off with a no nonsense attitude and triggering content up front. The writing style is relatable and the use of imagery takes the reader on the chaotic events with the characters.
I enjoyed the humor and the supernatural elements in the story. The characters were well written and unique.

Bizarre, hilarious at times, and *almost* what it needed to be.

This one got my attention from the start because the writing is so good. Acerbic, wry, and sharp, Hogarth has a biting wit and a commanding tone. The voice she achieves is perfect for that particular breed of literary fiction where you spend a lot of time cringing at the content and hating the characters, yet are enthralled by their thoughts and the way the author expresses them.

Plot wise, this isn’t necessarily to my taste, but the writing made up for it all the way up until the end when the whole thing went too far off the rails for me to truly say I thought it was an exceptionally good book.

It’s worth reading for the dark humor and clever turns of phrase, but be advised, it’s dark, kind of gross, and I don’t think I’d recommend it for anyone who has, let’s say, unresolved mother issues.