Mary was one of those books that I really wanted to like, but it left me a bit bored as the story is long and dragged on at times. The reader (listener, in my case) knows what is going on before Mary does and then we have to wait for her to catch up. I really like the premis of this book and there were parts of it I really loved but, unfortunately, the time it took to get to those parts was just to long.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for allwing me an advance audio copy of this book for my honest review.

"Is it me or does every trip to the bathroom become a f*&king horror movie when you get to a certain age?!"

"Why isn't there a holiday for middle age?"

The audio narrator on this one was excellent, she sort of sounded like Sally Field.

This book has a little bit of everything, I highly recommend listening to the book all the way through to the afterword and acknowledgements, as they provided so much more insight into the making of this novel.

It's a story about a woman named Mary, who is perimenopausal and is seeing all sorts of crazy stuff...she HATES the "C" word and it's not what you think. It absolutely sets her off. Mary's Aunt Nadine was a riot and also incredibly annoying...a real wild one. There are some culty elements too, which was fun.

I cannot truly describe what I listened to because there were so many different elements and moving parts. I can tell you that "the loved ones" for some reason weirded me out the most.

Trigger Warning - There is an element of animal abuse, it's pretty quick but the aftermath is descriptive so BEWARE.

The inspiration for this book was Carrie and I just think this book was really well done. This book is creepy, weird and oddly awesome!

I almost feel like I didn't complete digest all that this book is. I think it might be worth a relisten...but bear in mind, it is a longer book at almost 16 hours long. I think it would've been better if it was a bit shorter. So rather than relistening, I'm hoping that there is a screen adaptation because I think it would absolutely be a hit.

The author began writing this book when he was a teenager and as he grew and matured he questioned whether, as a male he had any right to write about a perimenopausal woman...he didn't want to speak on things he didn't have a right to write about. IMHO I think he did a good job, I didn't take offense to it at all. I enjoyed it.

Mary was a unique look into the mind of a woman who thinks she's going crazy, when in reality there is a much deeper and terrifying reason she's acting the way she is. Mary is a middle-aged woman who is going through menopause. When she goes to help take care of her aunt who is dying, Mary realizes the things she thought were all in her head are real.

Mary comes from a line of people with mental illness. She also doesn't remember a lot what she does or has done in her past. This book is gory, disturbing, and surprising in more ways than one.

The twist that happens in around the 50% mark wasn't my favorite at first, but that is when the book really takes off and you learn so much about Mary's past and what's really going on. I really started to feel for Mary at that point.

I also appreciated the forward and afterward the author provided. Those two things really changed my perspective on some of the things that happened in the book.

This was good, really good. I received the audiobook from Netgalley and was ecstatic because I've been wanting to read this since I first heard about it months ago. I applied to get an ARC copy of the book and was sadly declined. When I saw the audiobook was available, I figured I probably wouldn't get it but I had to try. The Netgalley gods must've been smiling down on me, because, well, here I am after finishing the book, trying to figure out how to review this.

Like I said it's good, really good. But,I think what made it even better, was the narrator. She was awesome!! I couldn't love her voice that she chose for Nadine anymore than I do. Perfection.

The book itself was really good but really long. I thought it was going to wrap up at least 3 different times, and honestly, it could've. But, it just kept on going. So, I'm caught between really loving the characters and the world and the twists that the author created and the fact that it really needed to be condensed to become truly great.

I'm really thankful I got the chance to listen to this book. The author wrote an amazing and very insightful book(especially being a male writing about a middle aged female experiencing perimenopause). And the perspectives that he wrote from (including a serial killer,people in a cult like community, victims of murder, police/FBI officials, a cranky, crass older lady, etc) were also insightful and very 3 dimensional.

Very well written and enjoyable... just a bit stretched out. 4⭐️

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan for this advanced reader copy.

This week’s headline? Fucking ants!

Why this book? Synopsis sounded interesting

Which book format? Audio ARC

Primary reading environment? On my couch

Any preconceived notions? I want to be terrified.

Identify most with? No one

Three little words? “mind cleansing work”

Goes well with? Shelving books

Recommend this to? No one

Other cultural accompaniments: Carrie (1976)

Grade: 1.5/5

I leave you with this: “There’s always been an evil energy in the air here, a poison. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to breathe right now.”
📚📚📚📚📚

Mary is an homage to Carrie, but with a middle-aged woman starting menopause rather than a young girl getting her period. When Mary was young her parents died in a fire and had a difficult childhood. After she’s been fired from her library job and her rent is being raised she is called by her aunt to return to her hometown to be her caretaker. Mary is not a very stable person, but don’t call her “crazy,” or you’ll regret it.

I was hoping for this to scare me, but I was mostly bored. The story goes on for what seems like forever and the audio narrator is awful. So robotic. I was hoping it might work as a juxtaposition with the graphic descriptions of gore but it did the text no favors. I’m wondering if I would’ve liked it more if I read it rather than listened, but I’ll never know because I have no plans to revisit this fragmented novel.

tw: blood, gore, murder

Mary: An Awakening of Terror will be released on July 19, 2022.

Mary: An Awakening of Terror is one of those books that required a bit of processing before reviewing. It is insidious in nature and a brutal bloody horror of a story. I liked it!

I’m going to avoid going into too much detail because Mary’s story should be experienced with as little knowledge as possible!

Middle aged Mary returns home to Arizona to take care of her ailing Aunt. The timing couldn’t be better because she’s just been let go from her job. Going back there doesn’t help the symptoms she’s been experiencing, though, symptoms of peri-menopause the doctor at the free clinic tells her but Mary thinks it’s more than that. The visions of melting faces on women and the horrible rage filled thoughts are just the start of Mary’s problems.

Soon after her arrival, Mary begins to see the ghosts of women in varying stages of decay and mutilation; soon after this, things take a turn for the worse. People are being horrifically murdered much the same as they were years before by the now dead serial killer, Damon Cross.

There are twists and there are turns in this gruesome tale but the real gem lies in the character of Mary and the building of her personality, chapter by chapter. I listened to this one primarily on audio and Susan Bennett does an impressive job narrating.

If you’re a fan of horror, don’t miss out on this one!

My thanks to @MacMillan.Audio for this gifted ALC.

Okay let me just start right here and say this book is not for everyone. It is absolutely fantastic but it has some very serious triggers and if you can not handle them please skip this one.
Triggers: body horror, blood, gore, death, depression, sexual assault, abuse, ableism, and animal mutilation.
Now on to the book. This book was amazing! When I talk about horror that has something to say this is what I am talking about! This book takes on some of the absolute worst things in humanity head on and makes it just as jaw dropping and upsetting as it should be.
Cassidy did an absolutely amazing job projecting anger and fear with this. I could not put this book down. Not only because I needed to know what was going to happen next but because I wanted to be with Mary as long as possible. I wanted to follow her story to its inevitable conclusion.
I will say this book is long and has some bits that feel confusing but trust me it all makes sense in the end. Cassidy knew exactly what he was doing. This book is absolutely phenomenal and I need more people to love it and talk about it because this book needs to become a horror darling!

B+ / 87% / ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

While this book does occasionally suffer from uneven pacing, Mary is both a thrilling novel of horror and a compellingly immersive narrative.

Carrie's Compliment, Mary: Horror Awakening satisfies a passion for two styles of horror: brutal violence and provocative commentary. Mary is an anonymous woman in her forties, with a constant confrontation between the lack of social expectations and desires for unmarried women of that age and the gradual control and understanding of her supernatural powers. I find Nat Cassidy's work very attractive, it has a certain hysterical energy and is terribly ironic at times. This reduces the number of very generous pages that can be further truncated.Marie feels "disjointed" from start to finish. This is a compliment because we are grateful if the story deliberately deviates from common metaphors and formative parentheses. Increased violence (beware if the reason is cruelty to animals), imaginative tone of the narrative (the novel is initially ugly and scary, but soon becomes "lively" and more cheerful. Masu), and finding a certain opponent is nice and ultimately cute character.Yes, Marie:

The horror awakening is a bit boring and depends on the "it doesn't have to be that long" aspect, but I fully appreciated his unique insights and bespoke executions (there are many). those are different) -Carry + Heritage + Silent Hill (mainly the 2006 film) gives you a general idea of ​​this novel.

Wow, that was something. It was gory and disturbing and interesting. A peri menapausal woman, serial killers, ghosts, you name it. I have never read anything like that

I was in the mood to read something in the horror genre and this book definitely fit the bill. MARY: AN AWAKENING OF TERROR, by Nat Cassidy, and wonderfully narrated by Susan Bennett, is a very engaging story and kept my interest throughout.

Mary is a very mild mannered, middle aged, peri menopausal woman. She keeps to herself and is practically invisible to those around her. After she gets fired from her job in the big city she goes back to her childhood hometown in hopes of finding herself again. However, she finds out way more about herself than she could have ever imagined! The voices in her head get louder and her lapses in time are more frequent. Then the killings start. Again.

Thanks NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this advance copy (will be published July 19th) in exchange for my honest review. I loved it. 5 stars!

There’s something tactful about the author’s note coming at the close of a book, because if I’d known Mary was a horror novel about menopause first drafted by a 13-year old boy I think I would have hit pause on the audiobook from the start. As it stands, this is in fact a horror novel about menopause that saw it’s incpetion in the mind of a 13-year old boy, was eventually written by a full grown man, and apparently run through the gamut of sensitivity readers. It’s laden with gore, and cults, and analogies to real world issues of ageism - all great things in concept, for the genre. And while technically sound, there’s just something fundamentally wrong about this book that is completely separate from the inherent weirdness of the concept.

I just don’t think there’s any context I could enjoy, or even just fundamentally appreciate, a 400 page horror novel about menopause written by a cis man. And I’d think I’d say the same if this book had been written by a woman who hasn’t yet gone through menopause - there’s just something about it that rings incredibly hollow. I won’t fault this book for committing to the gruesome implications of a “horror” novel - it really does go there. There were moments I felt viscerally ill listening to the audiobook, but it feels a bit “just there for the shock factor” then truly necessary for the message. A message, mind you, that I fully thought was about the ageism women face relative to men as they progress in years in life. Menopause is tangnetinal to this, but still distinctly different enough that I’m not sure the author got the intended point across.

There’s also some very weird moments where the 50+ year old female narrator describes her young teenage co-worker in a way that was incredibly male-gazey. I understand a certain level of fixation on this kind of obvious youth when faced with the reality of growing older, but their interactions were implicitly sexualized in a way that I’ve never seen a woman write. Easily the most disturbing aspect of this horror novel, in a book where a women forces literal shards china down another person’s throat to murder them (spoiler?).

If I had to describe Mary in one word it would be “gratuitous.” If I were given a second word, it would be “misplaced.” This is another kind of contentious story that I feel that author wrote with no ill intentions, but just didn’t quite hit the mark by nature of not having the necessary life experiences to get the point across. Maybe if you can set aside the metaphor here and just go in looking for a gorey, gruesome experience you may love it. But it’s a miss for me.

Thank you to the publisher Macmillan Audio for providing an audiobook ARC via NetGalley for an honest review.

It is hard for me to rate this book, as it is so full of disgusting bloody gore and senseless violence that I almost stopped listening several times -- but it is a well-written, compelling story with lots of cool metaphorical ideas about the invisibility of aging, silently raging women. So I settled on giving it four stars, shaving just one star off for what seemed like grossly gratuitous violence because the book is listed as horror, a genre I rarely read, so perhaps the extreme gore is just to be expected. (?)

I listened to this audio version courtesy of Netgalley and the publisher, and the narrator, Susan Bennett, was excellent at conveying the growth and change of the main character, who starts off mealy-mouthed and mousy and winds up coming into her power in a major way. Bennett also did an excellent gravelly voice for the hateful aunt, a perfect light accent for the kind Mexican nurse, and a great job with a whole range of other characters. I also appreciated the author's audio introduction, in which he acknowledged that the book contained a lot of misogyny and that he'd worked with sensitivity readers to ferret out moments when his own, unconscious sexism showed up in the text.

Overall, I loved the idea of a horror book that explores the hidden depths of a lonely, middle-aged, perimenopausal woman who is used to being ignored and is treated accordingly. Mary, the title character, seeks help at a free clinic, where she tries to explain that she's suffering not only hot flashes and mood swings but actual hallucinations in which every woman she looks at begins to melt into an aging hag, including her own self in the mirror. The dismissive doctor just diagnoses her with a "textbook case" of menopause and tells her to follow up with her gynecologist, a doctor she doesn't have because she has no health insurance. Then she's fired from the job she holds in a bookstore, where she has worked longer than anyone else in the store. At home with her "loved ones," a collection of porcelain dolls, she pours her heart out to their pretty ceramic faces because she has no one else who will listen. Readers will feel sympathy for Mary, but probably also impatience with her for being such a sad-sack doormat.

Then Mary continues her poor decision-making and accepts a pleading call from her awful aunt, who bitterly raised her after Mary's parents died in a fire. She agrees to fly home to care for the aunt, who claims she is dying, and in doing so returns to her hometown, where we learn about the early horrors she endured there. The town is full of literal and figurative ghosts, furies, cults, and serial killers, and seems like an altogether horrible place to be a woman. And in this environment, against all odds, Mary begins to bloom, gaining access to her own anger and sense of righteous justice.

In the final third, the book takes some extra strange turns that stretched my credulity to the snapping point, but by then I was so inured to the relentless violence that I just allowed myself to be carried along, focusing more on what the book was saying metaphorically than what it was actually saying. If you like horror and can handle a lot of violence in your fiction, I would recommend this book for its smart messaging and chilling surprises.

This book confirmed that this genre is not for me. This is a classic case of it’s not you, it’s me! The book did have me from the very beginning with the word from the author.

Even though this book isn’t for me I know many people will enjoy it!

Thank you Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for this alc.

What a ride! There is so much in this story. I was a little intimidated when I realized this audiobook was over 15 hours but it simply flew by and when I finished it I had to sit with it to think and understand my feelings about this novel. I ended up giving it 5 stars.

Mary is a forty-nine year old woman in the early stages of menopause. She lives in New York, works in a bookstore, and she has always been the kind of person who feels invisible, the kind of person who goes to work everyday, does what she is supposed to do, but people barely notice her presence.

Along with the hot flashes — symptoms of the menopause — weird things have been happening to Mary. She started seeing horrendous ghosts, a distorted figure when she looks herself into the mirror, has been having trouble sleeping, hearing voices, among other kind of things of the same nature.

Mary lives alone in her apartment and does not have any friends. Her porcelain figures, named by Mary as her “loved ones”, are whom she talks to. But one day, Mary is fired from her job and unable to pay her rent, decides to return to her hometown to take care of her old aunt Nadine. Her hometown is a desert town. A town full of secrets and weird people. And from the moment Mary arrives there, what was bad only gets worse.

The novel is full of twists and turns. Sometimes I thought the story was dragging a little bit, going nowhere, but I was very engaged in it, couldn’t stop listening to it, and just ended up accepting the “chaos” that was this whole thing. From serial killer, to ghosts, reincarnation, mediumship, and cults, and gore — a lot of gore — this book ended up being a feminist horror story.

The characters are flawed, some you love, other ones you hate. My favorite one was aunt Nadine, who loves reading about conspiracy theories, psychics, aliens, and paranormal activities. She is a very straightforward character, with a lousy mouth. She is also an abuser. She is extremely rude and mean, and mentally abuses of Mary.

The narrative is very very dark, and the author uses humor in a lot of passages as a comic relief to uplift the heavy tone of the narrative. The audiobook worked really well for me. Susan Bennett does a spectacular job pouring all kinds of emotions in this narration. I am not sure if I have read a physical copy of this book I would have enjoyed this book as much as I did.

I was also pleased with the ending and loved all the references to Kate Chopin's The Awakening. This book is one of those who makes you realize that in horror stories things don’t always have to make a lot of sense. Sometimes they only need to be enjoyed and appreciate it. If you are interested in reading this book, check out the author’s note with the trigger warnings and enjoy the ride!

The titular Mary is a perimenopausal woman trying to survive in a deeply misogynist world. As well as hot flashes, Mary also suffers from disturbing symptoms that make her doubt her sanity. Mary gets fired from her job at a New York City bookstore, so when her Aunt Nadine calls to ask for Mary’s help, she takes the opportunity to flee across the country to her hometown in Arizona.

However, things get even stranger once she arrives in Arizona. Mary begins to see ghosts, and the whole town seems a little cult-like. And Mary gets glimpses into her past that don’t tally with her own recollection. And then, of course, there’s the echoes of the local serial killer that targeted women 50 years prior to Mary’s arrival…

Mary, Nat Cassidy’s debut novel, has apparently been decades in the making; a first draft was scribbled by a teenage Cassidy. This is a long novel, but it is compelling. Mary is a great character, and her frankly bonkers journey is incredibly entertaining. So much happens to Mary, that my synopsis doesn’t even begin to scratch the bloody surface.

Narrator Susan Bennett delivers an incredible performance. Her embodiment of the myriad characters is fantastic, especially Aunt Nadine (who has some of the funniest lines in the novel).

In his afterword, Cassidy, a cis male in his late thirties, acknowledges that maybe he is not the best person to tell the story of perimenopausal woman. On some level I agree with him, but this is an entertaining novel that doesn’t have too much basis in reality, and the author has clearly done his research, as Mary is a very believable, authentic character.

Mary is for fans of horror, true crime, or anyone just seeking a very entertaining, but incredibly dark novel.

First and foremost - that COVER is stunning. I can't get enough of it.

I... am so at a loss for what to say after finishing this one. While it didn't scare me / make me genuinely uncomfortable in the vein of my previous read (Pearl), Mary: An Awakening of Terror keeps you on your toes and guessing at every turn. I'd be lying if I said I was entirely satisfied with the ending, but I'm not mad about it.

If you're a horror buff and ready for a slightly longer than usual read - pick this one up.

What the actual FUCK was this? Oh my god, I loved it. Straddling the line of "this woman is UNHINGED" and I hate her while also "oh god but I'm rooting for her. Good for her" oh man. This was good. I felt deeply uncomfortable for a good portion of this book, but I wouldn't have asked for anything more. It was unsettling and visceral without going for weird shock B.S. for the sake of shocking. Nope. This is what the current horror writers should be striving for. Damn.

Such an awesome horror novel. I think the majority of the criticism for this book will come from the length, which I unfortunately agree with. No matter how much I enjoyed it, there’s no reason for this book to be over 400 pages. I listened to the audiobook and it was 16 hours long!! Nevertheless, I loved this story. Nat Cassidy deserves a lot of credit for writing a woman protagonist in a believable and compelling way… almost unheard of, at least from the male written fiction I read. I loved being in Mary’s head, but the true standout for me was Aunt Nadine. Such a memorable and hilariously fun character. Part of me thinks I would have preferred the physical reading experience over listening but I thought the audiobook narrator did a fantastic job, so who knows. I wanted just a little something more from the ending but I hate to nitpick because I will be recommending this to all horror fans!

This book is perfectly creepy and had me hooked even though the pacing of the story was a bit slow. As the story unfolds you begin to understand why Mary is the way she is. You can understand her frustrations and her fury. Is she really seeing things? What is real? What isn’t?

If you are looking for a unique horror book this is for you. Not for the squeamish! Completely looking forward to seeing what new frights Nat Cassidy writes next.

I want to thank NetGalley, Nat Cassidy and Macmillan Audio for the e-ARC of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are honest, my own and left voluntarily.