Graveyard of Lost Children by Katrina Monroe
Poisoned Pen Press (May 2023)
368 pages; $15.17 paperback; e-book $6.49
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Katrina Monroe has done it again.
Much like in her debut, They Drown Our Daughters, Monroe’s latest release, a modernized and stylish gothic grim, Graveyard of Lost Children doesn’t just scare. It lurks, prods, then manifests into a hellish dreamscape where reality bends and breaks. And it all starts with the skull-splitting cry of life of a baby.
Men in fiction often exist with only the limitation of the created world’s circumstances, like Jack Torrance versus the ghosts of The Overlook Hotel in The Shining, for example. Men live as they are, no matter how villainous or twisted, and readers accept them. For women, it’s far more complex than that. The readers’ critical eyes sharpen. There has to be a reason. Why would Carrie White kill her classmates? I mean beyond the excessive ridicule and abuse. King fills the pages of Carrie with men, police, FBI, and scientists, hunting for the big WHY behind that fateful night of Carrie’s reign. I can’t imagine if King had made her pregnant because it’s one thing to be an “inferior” or deranged woman but another thing altogether to be an inferior mother.
In Graveyard of Lost Children, four-month-old Olivia goes missing. Olivia’s mother, a soon-to-be teen mom driven by haunting visions, obsessed over a black-haired woman she claimed swapped her Olivia with a changeling from the well.
My mother starved me because she thought I was eating her soul.
Years later, with her mother committed, Olivia delivers a daughter of her own. Everyone talks about “bouncing back,” or the motherly glow, but Olivia only feels the crushing weight of dread. The baby bites at her, sucking her skin raw, and takes and takes. Does she not love her child? What if it’s not hers at all? What if Olivia’s mother wasn’t insane?
And here lies the haunting grounds of the black-haired woman.
At first, the black-haired woman, a reoccurring and haunting presence throughout the story, felt like a tired image of horror. I should have known better, this being my second Katrina Monroe read. The black-haired woman works. It’s fearsome, yet there’s a flicker of familiarity, one you just can’t put your finger on. It’s what you know but all wrong. Frighteningly wrong. It’s classic and effective.
I was terrified reading Graveyard of Lost Children. It’s femme fierce and horrific all at once. It’s enraging and liberating. Monroe will tear you to pieces and put you back together, only to devour you whole.
Fans of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor and Shudder-hit Huesera won’t want to miss Graveyard of Lost Children.
