Entomophobia by Sarah Hans
Omnium Gatherum Media (January 2022)
178 pages; $14.99 Paperback; $3.49 ebook
Reviewed by Anton Cancre
Bugs, amiright? Creepy little bastards. Skittering around on too many legs. Staring at us with too many eyes. Click-clacking their chitinous carapaces from the dark corners. Then they have the nerve to squirt out all those gloppy bits when you squish them. EW!
Welp, Entomophobia, the debut novel from Sarah Hans, follows someone who is having a rough enough go at life before the hard-shelled jerks come into play. Meri is dealing with a horrid divorce, living back with her rather caustic mother, trying to hold onto even partial custody of her daughter, and maybe even survive. Then she steals from the wrong craft store, gets cursed, and starts turning into the thing she fears the most.
With that kind of intro, you could be forgiven for expecting a modern riff on the Kafka classic with this story. You’d be wrong though. Instead, this is more of an intensely personal horror of a woman desperately trying to claw back control of a life that has spun away from her.
With fae curses and skin centipedes and attack cicadas, it tends to lean even weirder than you are likely expecting.
Anyone who has read Sarah’s prolific backlog of short stories, my personal favorite being “Tiny Teeth,” knows that this focus on character and the emotional effect of regular life horror ratcheted up with surreal horrors is totally her jam. Entomophobia uses that skillset with character to dig its claws, or pincers, deep into the readers’ squishy, tender skin. Meri is flawed as all hell, but she feels real in her flaws. It all feels so honest that the weird and creepy bits hit with a heck of a punch.
If you are looking for a strange but oddly grounded tale with some unnerving body horror at its core, you won’t go wrong here.
