Mary

Mary Mudgett has spent nearly fifty years making herself invisible. Quiet, overlooked, and unknowable even to herself, she scrapes by at a New York bookstore until she's abruptly fired—just as her body begins to betray her. Along with hot flashes and aches, she can no longer look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head are growing louder, urging her toward things she doesn't want to name.

Returning home to Arizona to care for her ailing aunt, Mary finds the horrors following her. Visions of decaying older women step out of her nightmares as ghosts, and their appearance coincides with a fresh string of killings that echoes a notorious local murderer. With the help of a true-crime-obsessed teenager, Mary starts to trace a connection between the ghosts, the killer, and something buried in her own past—even as everyone around her insists she's simply a textbook case of a woman losing her mind to menopause.

Nat Cassidy's Mary: An Awakening of Terror is a gory, propulsive horror novel that uses its blood-soaked plot to interrogate how society renders middle-aged women invisible and disposable. Expect mounting dread, sharp social commentary, and a climax that earns its splatter.