Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine
Sourcebooks Landmark (August 2023)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Welcome to pregnancy. As you grow your bundle of joy, you’ll experience discomfort. That’s just part of it.
But why?
In Delicate Condition, Danielle Valentine mounds a tower of dread with every dismissive doctor and sacrifice Anna makes for her child, all before she’s pregnant. Early on, this book reminded me of Ira Levine’s Rosemary’s Baby, where the spouse, neighbors, and doctors view the woman more as a vessel than a person. There’s a simplicity in how Valentine conveys this, so familiar, yet still so horrific. Misogyny needs no ghost. Gaslighting needs no demon.
Anna is an actress famous for a short-lived sitcom called Spellbound. She recently starred in a new film which became a hit with critics and viewers. Her publicist even thinks she can get Anna on television with Seth Meyers. But Anna wants a baby more than an Oscar and fame. All of that can wait, as the world is happy to remind her that she is not getting any younger.
She’s willing to do anything to make it happen. IVF needles? No problem. Her husband, Dex’s terrible kale smoothies? She’d down it fast. All the tests and waiting? She’d waited this long. Valentine did an incredible job establishing Anna’s desperation; I felt it in my bones. I hoped and hoped for her.
But something is bothering Anna. A stalker she suspects, breaking into her home, following her to Dr. Hill’s office, and, worst of all, leaving behind disheveled Spellbound dolls with Anna’s likeness and pregnancy woes carefully mirrored. Not to mention the awful comments online about whether she deserves a baby at all.
This book does not let up. I’m telling you, you’ll fly through it.
Delicate Condition is thematically complex, but that’s the genius behind it because pregnancy is complex. Several symbols, like the Spellbound dolls, create all-encompassing antagonistic forces that make readers feel every fall these women take, the loss of themselves before motherhood, the grief, and the vulnerability, psychologically and physically.
The things that make you lucky could also be the things that made you suffer.
The power of belief is a common theme in the horror genre. I always think of The Haunting of Hill House, the house’s dark history and looming presence. That’s what pregnancy is like for Anna. Enter the supernatural elements. What is Anna carrying? Why is she craving such unnatural things? Who can she trust?
Is it all in her mind, or is something more vicious than she ever could’ve realized at play?
Delicate Condition is palpably tense and twisted with a gripping presentation of the “ongoing experiment” that is women’s health. Fuming with gaslighting, the alleged evils of witchcraft, conspiracies, and all the body horror that comes with child-bearing, Valentine’s book leaps from the page, shaking you, begging you, women, men, please, listen.
Believe women.
Readers who enjoyed Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Graveyard of Lost Children by Katrina Monroe will devour Delicate Condition.
This book inspired the recent American Horror Story season, Delicate, starring Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian. I’m eager to see if the series upholds Valentine’s cleverness in using horror to dissect medical sexism and society’s perception of motherhood.
Either way, I’m sure it won’t be a delicate watch, but bloody, hair-raising, and realistically terrifying. I can’t wait.
