Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (2023) and a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (2014).
Her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and Joyland, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.
At Shepherd Lee tagged five favorite gothic novels about distressed women. One title on the list:
The Need by Helen PhillipsRead about another entry on the list.
One of my favorite hair-raising tropes is the hostile doppelgänger, and this one really delivers! After sensing an intruder in the house, Molly, a young mother,encounters a menacing double who calls herself “Moll” and claims to be her from an alternate reality, one where she has no children—which prompts her to claim Molly’s.
What makes this book so tense and creepy is Molly’s unreliable POV as she wrestles with her anxiety, exhaustion, and protectiveness over her two young children. Is Moll the manifestation of a psychotic breakdown? Does Molly want to vanquish her or trade places? The prose is potent and spare, with short chapters alternating between past and present action, twisting the suspense all the way to its ambiguous—but for me, satisfying—conclusion.
The Need is among Ainslie Hogarth's eight novels about monstrous mothers, Amanda Mactas's five top horror novels driven by maternal instinct, Michael J. Seidlinger's top ten terrifying home invasions in fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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