POCKET FULL OF TEETH

Hardy’s debut novel, a fusion of gothic horror, mystery, and supernatural fiction, focuses on women dealing with profound loss and loneliness.

The story begins as police interview Eddy Sparrow for reasons that aren’t immediately clear to the reader.Eddy is a woman whose recently deceased mother—chair of the history department at Georgia State University—was sent a manuscript before her death that was found buried in a canister in the backyard of an abandoned estate. The property, located in northern Alabama, was allegedly haunted, as was the manuscript, which is rumored to curse anyone who reads it. As Eddy talks to the police officer in her home over tea, she shares the heartrending story recounted in the manuscript, which chronicles the tragic life of Cat, who lived on the estate with her mother, Sarah, and her mother’s cheating boyfriend, Ray—“the man who ate [Sarah] from the inside until there was nothing left.” Watching her mother be physically and emotionally abused by Ray while helpless to stop it, Cat is devastated when her mother dies; compounding her grief, the courts send the minor back to the house to live with her mother’s abuser. Parts of the manuscript include excerpts from Sarah’s journal, which includes horrific revelations and charts her descent into madness at the end of her life. The innovative structure of the narrative—a journal within a manuscript within a police interrogation—works well to keep the reader turning pages, and the impressively deep character development makes the cast members feel authentic, identifiable, and emotionally dimensional—particularly in the case of Cat and her intense relationship with her mother. The mystery surrounding Cat’s mother’s death is kept tantalizing beyond reach until the very last pages, where bombshell plot twists will have readers picking their collective jaws up off the floor. But it’s the creepy atmospherics and the author’s dark, lyrical writing style that makes the story so unforgettable: Hardy describes an old well covered with rotting wood planks at its center as a “huge mouth that drank in the darkness.”

Haunting and powerful, this dark little gem of a novel is an absolute must-read.