MOTHERTHING

She's dead but she still won't leave: a mother-in-law horror story.

Abby and Ralph Lamb were just a sweet, ordinary couple getting ready to start a family when Ralph's mother, Laura, turned their world into a living hell, first by insisting they move in with her, then by slitting her wrists in the basement. Even the resources Ralph downloaded from the Borderline Parent website can't help them with the version of Laura they have to deal with now—a vengeful ghost, a rampaging motherthing. Abby knows all too well about motherthings, having read the research on orphaned lab monkeys who need maternal affection so badly that a rolled-up pair of socks can do the trick and having resorted in her own youth to cuddling a corduroy couch while her own worthless fuckhole of a parent (get ready for lots of strong language and fecal imagery in this book) was busy paying attention to "Todd or Doug or Randy." Though Abby tried desperately to please her, Laura is as cruel in death as she was in life, and now the usually adoring Ralph is withdrawing into his own fog of hallucinatory despair. The only person who's still giving Laura any love at all is Mrs. Bondy, a nonverbal patient at the nursing home where she works—and if Mrs. Bondy's horrible daughter goes through with her plan to move her to a different facility, Abby will just have to kill her and serve Janet à la king for dinner. Hogarth's way with words enlivens every page of this psycho romp, whether describing its unlikely hero, Cud, "a fourteen-year-old Pomeranian, which hung from her hip like a colostomy bag and always had a look on his face like you’d forgotten to wish him a happy birthday," or a drawer full of plastic bags: "when one is pulled, they must all sing the crackling songs of their ancestors." Her fearlessness and utter lack of inhibition animate the desperate longing and bitter trauma at the heart of this ghost story, administered with a steady drip of comic relief.

Profane, insane, hilarious, disgusting—and unexpectedly moving.