Clare Beams is the author of novels The Garden and The Illness Lesson, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
[The Page 69 Test: The Illness Lesson]
At Electric Lit Beams tagged nine stories that capture the near-supernatural feeling of being a mother, including:
The Upstairs House by Julia FineRead about another entry on the list.
Here, a new mother’s postpartum psychosis takes the form of a haunting by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family,and other deliciously strange children’s books. Megan’s dissertation on children’s literature has been languishing during her first pregnancy, but when her daughter is born, a new realm—literally another floor of her building—opens up to her. “And there it was, halfway down the stairs. An unusual door…intricately carved, its paint a peeling turquoise. I’d never seen it before…What was behind it? I couldn’t help myself. I knocked…I heard, ‘Come in.’” A treacherous invitation, Megan finds, once she accepts it. In this new world, which only Megan can enter, Margaret and her partner are very much alive, and full of desires, having taken new energy from the confluence of Megan’s mind and her body, her selfhood and her selflessness, her love for her daughter and her love for herself.
The Upstairs House is among Katrina Monroe's nine terrible mothers in horror fiction and Leah Konen's seven top thrillers that explore the darker side of motherhood.
My Book, The Movie: The Upstairs House.
The Page 69 Test: The Upstairs House.
--Marshal Zeringue
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