Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Sister, Maiden, Monster is a visceral story set in the aftermath of our planet’s disastrous transformation and told through the eyes of three women trying to survive the nightmare, from Bram Stoker Award-winning author Lucy A. Snyder.

To survive they must evolve.

A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces pull a small group of women together.

Erin, once quiet and closeted, acquires an appetite for a woman and her brain. Why does forbidden fruit taste so good?

Savannah, a professional BDSM switch, discovers a new turn-on: committing brutal murders for her eldritch masters.

Mareva, plagued with chronic tumors, is too horrified to acknowledge her divine role in the coming apocalypse, and as her growths multiply, so too does her desperation.

Inspired by her Bram Stoker Award-winning story “Magdala Amygdala,” Lucy A. Snyder delivers a cosmic tale about the planet’s disastrous transformation … and what we become after.

Review:

Sister, Maiden, Monster has a reputation for being a weird book, one of those horror novels that fits into several different subgenres and none of them at the same time. It is cosmic horror. It is zombie horror. It is apocalypse horror. It is body horror. It is sapphic horror. Since it falls into so many different categories, and it is a good, weird novel, Sister, Maiden, Monster is also one of those rare novels that belongs on several different stacks of book recommendations.

The book starts out with Erin coming home to an anniversary dinner, happy with her relationship and her life. During this dinner, with sushi and wine, Erin starts to feel awful, and this is the last normal night of her life. She gets a virus that has several different classifications with different predilections that the sufferer displays. Some want to drink blood, some want to eat brains, but all of the people who have survived the virus are a danger to the rest of society due to their unpredictable nature. Erin has to live alone, be monitored all of the time, and have routine checkups at the hospital for her desires and impulses. Little does anyone know that the person who picks her up from the hospital in her rideshare will the be the person who beats these restrictions and changes Erin’s life for good. While Erin is figuring out her new life as someone with these new, strange, and somewhat dangerous proclivities, Savannah is gaining knowledge and power about the coming apocalypse through meeting people and killing them. When she kills a Catholic monk, she starts to get his guidance and visions of who she is in the coming apocalypse and who she needs to recruit for help. Erin is on that list. Also on the list is Mareva, a random office worker who has a special role in the coming end of the world that she is not going to like it. While the world is burning, Sister, Maiden, Monster focuses on the smaller stories of the people who are initially infected by the worldwide virus and their reluctant role in what is going to be the end of the world. 

Sister, Maiden, Monster is a wild ride. Early in the novel, it is obvious that there is no way to figure out how it is going to end, and trying to predict what will happen next is impossible. The characters are fairly interesting, but there is not much of the human left in them when they are turning into the things that the virus is wanting them to evolve into. Erin’s life starts out much different than it ends, and we do get to understand that while the characters are changing, they are losing their real human characteristics and turning into people completely driven by their desires and their impulses. This is a key factor in why this novel is so unpredictable: we are subject to the impulsiveness of the characters that no longer can make sense of the world how it used to be before they were radically altered by the virus. While going on this journey with these characters, they change physically as much as mentally. This makes it safe to say that the story more than the character development becomes the driving force. This is not a hindrance in the novel because there is enough action and horror that we do not even notice the characters being overshadowed by the plot. In the end Sister, Maiden, Monster lives up to the hype of being a weird and disturbing story that should be recommended in all of the different genre discussions.