I spent the first week of October aka the official beginnings of spooky season reading The Brood, Rebecca Baum’s latest surrealist horror novel. Baum is a writer and author, her recent work includes Lifelike Creatures (Regal House Publishing, September 2020) and now The Brood, the latest in her repertoire, a body-bug forward horror novel which released its shells on the world on October 28th, 2025. Each page is visceral, loaded with descriptive imagery and psychologically bloated thriller plot.
The main character: Mary Whelton, an overly sarcastic vainly unlikeable, self important lawyer from “the city” who crashlands her beamer in the upstate mountains following the funeral of an ex-lover, for whom she’d kept a secret affair with. A fight for strange perfection that falters into fractured-boned absurdity when confronted with something deeper than skin. Quick, witty, visually packed, this surreal fantasy had my eyes wide from start to finish. A confused plotline at points, though picking itself up, never dropping entirely, there is no momentum lost, like a horror film reverie playing back. Fending off woodland implants who embed in her epidermis, Mary drives the thematic imbalance of insecurity and attachment, as the story crawls with subterranean descriptions of implanted cicada gestation and generational Mother wounds.
In an alternate reality controlled by cicadas deep in the forests of an upstate location, Mary is entrapped in unstructured time through paralyzed form and dynamic socioecology. The Brood, where rationale is asked to take a walk in the woods so readers may enter a realm of entropy and far reaching feminist allegory as characters, Mary and Girl, descend into mass controlled hemiptera madness.
The Brood is available at Barnes & Nobles now.
The morning after I finish the novel, I buffer along the western frontier of Manhattan, the Hudson River. Winter waves lap up against the barrier of the West Side. Overcast, yet bright burning a retina now yet determining depth properly. I promenade parallel to the swooshing of waves breaking along the concrete shoreline. One hell of a day crackled from the other side of the city as the sun also rose. A cicada flew over, heading toward New Jersey.
