Mary: An Awakening of Terror

Mary is a quiet middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.

But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.

Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. What she finds instead are visions of terrifying mutilated specters that come with increasing regularity; she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases, and her investigations reveal that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.

Then the killings begin again.

Mary’s definitely going to find herself.

• Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy
• Published: MacMillan Audio on July 19, 2022
• Genre: Horror, suspense, thriller
• Listening length: 15 hours 30 minutes
• Dates listened: 10.8.15 – 10.14.25
• Format: Audiobook (borrowed on Libby)
• Narrator: Susan Bennett
• Add on Goodreads
• Purchase on Amazon
• ⭐⭐⭐⭐
• ☠☠☠

---

I remember the first time I ever got wind of this book was last year, when I saw a BookTok influencer that I follow doing one of her “silent book reviews”. Using her facial expressions only, you can tell what she thought of the book; if they made her cry, made her laugh, if she thought they were just ok, if they were shocking, etc. She always cracked me up, especially when she hated a book. She usually yeeted those books somewhere off the screen. This book got such treatment from her lol.

Since it’s my favorite season of the year, and Halloween is right around the corner, I’ve been trying to focus this month’s books on thrillers and horror to match the vibe. With a quick scroll through the “available now” section on Libby, this book showed up, and after reading the blurb, I decided to give it a shot, and I’m so glad that I did! Maybe it called to me because, let me be honest with you guys…I am a woman in my mid-40s who is going through perimenopause, and the struggle is real!! Half of the time, you wonder if you’re just going crazy; the rest of the time, you’re worried that you may be dying, and if not, are you going to end up in prison for murdering someone haha.

That may have been a bit TMI for you, but needless to say, I found myself understanding Mary. We had some similarities, such as avoiding mirrors. But I avoid them for entirely different reasons than Mary, thankfully. I fully believed that those voices in her head were due to the hormones and the struggle of menopause. I was not expecting that twist of where the voices were really coming from! That plot twist was probably my least favorite part of the book. I honestly think I would have preferred to think of Mary as just a hormone-induced rage machine seeking revenge for the wrongs that had been done to her throughout her life as a woman. I think that crazy religious plot twists are a bit overused sometimes, but that’s just me. Once that part came into play, it was giving me Midsommar vibes, if any of you are familiar with that movie.

No longer the girl, no longer the lover, no longer the mother. Her moon has moved, and this is her final gift to us!

Even though I loved Mary and felt her pain, my ultimate favorite character of the book turned out to be Nadine, her crotchety old aunt who raised her. No doubt Mary has some childhood trauma caused by this woman, but I still could not help loving her commentary. If you get offended by swearing, then you’ll want to pass this book up, because Nadine holds no punches and uses swear words in almost every sentence out of her mouth lol. Since I listened to this book on audiobook, I want to give praise to the narrator, Susan Bennett, because holy cow, she did an amazing job with all of the characters and their voices. Especially Nadine! Spoiler alert: I was so happy to know that she stuck around as a character even after her gruesome demise!

While this was definitely a dark book, with a lot of gore and disgusting things happening, some of the underlying themes apply to what life is really like as a woman. It’s a reminder of how women are seen, or not seen. What, and even they themselves, see as their value and their worth, and how a woman’s worth becomes even less as she ages. The horror of patriarchy is the true “horror” underlying Cassidy’s novel, Mary. You can argue all you want that patriarchy doesn’t exist in today’s culture, and I suppose it’s much better/worse depending on where you live. But even in the great, free country of the United States of America, patriarchy still thrives and is something that women have to deal with every single day. The fact that this was a book written by a male makes it all the more powerful. This is one of those books that the more and more I think about it, the more and more my like for it grows. I read the book expecting some thrills and chills, but walked away having a lot to think about and feeling like I had a bit too much in common with a murderer haha.

Potential triggers: descriptions of gore, child death, animal death, sexual assault