Beware the Woman

Description

An NPR Best Book of the Year

By the “master of thinly veiled secrets often kept by women who rage underneath their delicate exteriors” (Kirkus Reviews), Beware the Woman is Megan Abbott at the height of her game.

Honey, I just want you to have everything you ever wanted. That’s what Jacy’s mom always told her. And Jacy felt like she finally did. Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her new husband, Jed, embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Dr. Ash, in Michigan’s far-flung Upper Peninsula. The moment they arrive at the cottage snug within the lush woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the warm and hospitable Dr. Ash, if less so by his house manager, the enigmatic Mrs. Brandt.

But their Edenic first days take a turn when Jacy has a health scare. Swiftly, vacation activities are scrapped, and all eyes are on Jacy’s condition. Suddenly, whispers about Jed’s long-dead mother and complicated family history seem to eerily impinge upon the present, and Jacy begins to feel trapped in the cottage, her every move surveilled, her body under the looking glass. But are her fears founded or is it simply paranoia, or cabin fever, or—as is suggested to her—a stubborn refusal to take necessary precautions? The dense woods surrounding the cottage are full of dangers, but are the greater ones inside?Best Book of the Year
Lit Hub • CrimeReads • South Florida Sun-Sentinel • PBS

One of LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023
One of CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Fiction of 2023
One of Paste Magazine’s Most Anticipated Thrillers of 2023
One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Summer Reads 2023
One of TIME‘s Best Books of May 2023
One of CrimeReads’ Best Psychological Thrillers of May
One of USA Today’s Hottest New Books
One of Philadelphia Inquirer’s Best New Books of June
One of BookPage’s Best Thrillers of June
One of Orange County Register’s Must-Read Mysteries

“Abbott writes gripping thrillers, and a story about how pregnancy intersects with privacy, self-determination and safety – even for women in “good” situations – could not have come at a better time.” —Linda Holmes, NPR’s “Books We Love”

“Beware the Woman takes romantic suspense to the far edge of melodrama. . . . Abbott’s storytelling talent is on fine display here. We’re gripped from the first page and soon in the spell of an enchantment. . . . Abbott has undeniably given us a story we’ll never forget.” —Wall Street Journal

“In Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, entrapment creeps in stealthily. . . . [Abbott] inhabits the unique literary space she’s created with specificity and febrile intensity.” —Air Mail

“[Beware the Woman] has a real Rosemary’s Baby vibe. It’s creepy. . . . I could not stop turning the pages.” –John Searles, Today Show “Summer Picks”

“Megan Abbott, the queen of creepy stories, is back with another nailbiter. This time she delivers a modern-day gothic tale reminiscent of Rebecca and Rosemary’s Baby. . . . Get your night light ready because all is definitely not what it seems in this spine-chilling tale.” —Serendipity Magazine

“A stylish, sensual thriller that unfolds like a fever dream, with Abbott’s uncanny talents on display like never before. From the first page, we’re launched into a rich feeling of claustrophobia. . . . Abbott handles every new suspicion and revelation with a craftsman’s care, but what really elevates this novel is the pitch-perfect atmosphere, crafted with an immediacy and a physicality that make the reading at once disorienting and utterly thrilling.” —CrimeReads

“Abbott is a superstar of the suspense genre. . . . Beware the Woman is Rebecca wedded to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Along with the feverish psychological twists and turns that Abbott’s novels are celebrated for, Beware the Woman explores the timely topic of women’s autonomy over their own bodies.” —NPR

“Megan Abbott stands in her own league. . . . Superb, suspense-laden Beware the Woman, a novel that delves into manipulation . . . Abbott’s affinity for finely tuned pacing enhances the tension as Beware the Woman delves into in-depth character studies, misogynistic behavior, and love. . . . Abbott continues to be a provocative writer.” —Shelf Awareness

“Compelling.” –Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A slow-burning novel of almost unbearable tension, with a compelling, poetic narrative voice, an unsettling delirious atmosphere, an abundance of darkly funny one-liners and a plot that dramatizes, incisively, issues around patriarchy and female bodily autonomy; the violent, shocking, pulpy climax is splendidly lurid. A new Megan Abbott is a major event; she is always essential reading.” —The Irish Times

“Megan Abbott has gained a well-deserved reputation for writing psychological thrillers that deftly probe the darkness that lurks around the perimeters of many women’s lives. Her latest novel, Beware the Woman, does so in a particularly effective way, combining the claustrophobia of geographic isolation with the vulnerabilities of pregnancy to tell one woman’s harrowing story. . . . Readers won’t soon forget Jacy’s fierce yet frightened internal monologue as she struggles to make sense of her situation—and survive it.” —Book Reporter

“A cabin-fever suspense novel laced with menacing Rosemary’s Baby-ish undertones.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“Timely and terrifying.” —People

“Imagine Get Out but with feminist themes . . . Dripping with tense confrontations, curiously dead wives, and the gendered expectations that accompany both. It’s a suspenseful page-turner.” —Vulture

“Megan Abbott, master of crime fiction told through the female lens, has written another novel brimming with suspense. . . . Abbott spins an enigmatic web of foreboding and unease as she delves into family secrets and gender politics.” —TIME

“With this bewitchingly creepy tale, thriller queen Megan Abbott keeps readers questioning whether this family getaway is the stuff of anxiety dreams or Bluebeard nightmares.” —Oprah Daily

“For fans of remote mysteries, eerie situations, and the trope am-I-imagining-the-danger-or-is-the-danger-for-real?!” —Book Riot

“Megan Abbott goes Rosemary’s Baby!” —CrimeReads

“Abbott, a prolific author of noir and suspense, is famed for her uncanny facility with the interior lives of young women….In a genre that can be numbingly formulaic and indifferently composed, she remains a masterful builder of mood, her voluptuous prose heavy with sex and weather.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Terrific at finding dread around every corner, at making you see the grotesque and frightening in something previously mundane…Beware the Woman is a master class in suspense, with Abbott’s sentences and paragraphs seeming to get more breathless as the novel progresses, mirroring the rhythm of an increasingly frantic Jacy’s pounding heart.” —The Seattle Times

“Beware the Woman is a superb psychological thriller in all respects, evoking comparisons to nightmarish tales by the likes of Lisa Gardner and Harlan Coben. But there are also echoes of Daphne du Maurier and even Stephen King here, with Lacy serving as a narrator whose reliability is in question.” —BookTrib

“Abbott has constructed the plot of Beware the Woman with such wicked skill . . . [and] many sharply honed twists and whiplash surprises. Her vivid prose and white-knuckle pacing accelerate the book to its last shock.” —Tampa Bay Times

“Abbott is one of the most skilled architects of suspense alive . . . . For sheer escalating tension, Beware the Woman rates right up there with Stephen King’s Misery; it just shouts to be read in one sitting.” —BookPage

“Another knockout performance…Abbott is an accomplished storyteller…and this is one of her most compelling and well-constructed novels. A real treat for the author’s many fans and for everyone who treasures that sense of Gothic-tinged trouble both within and without. Think Rebecca in the UP. Abbott was once a cult favorite, but those times are long gone. She’s a crime-fiction A-lister now.” –Booklist (starred review)

“[A] spine-tingling suspense…Manipulating the sense of menace like a virtuoso violinist, Abbott expertly foreshadows the wrenching family secrets that are exposed in a ferocious finale. Sinewy prose and note-perfecting pacing make this a masterful and provocative deep dive into desire, love, and gender politics. Readers will be left breathless.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In this Rosemary’s Baby–esque tale, Abbott creates a summer psychological thriller that tempts the onset of goosebumps, with the devil hiding behind a handsome face or two.” —Library Journal

“Abbott masterfully uses the pretext of a pregnant woman’s heightened senses…to build a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity reminiscent of Get Out.  You’re sure to get chills. An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Beware the Woman is Megan Abbott at her best, which is about as good as it gets. A modern-day Gothic, it is chilling and creepy, feverish and surreal, and compulsively readable.” —Laura Lippman, author of Prom Mom

“Megan Abbott can do no wrong. Stunningly twisty, Beware the Woman so deftly holds some of the most pressing feminist issues of our time in an eerie, ominous grip. Bodily autonomy, reproduction, patriarchal power—this thriller feels terrifyingly of the moment, and perhaps that’s where the truest horror lies.” —Ashley Audrain, author of The Push

“Is there anyone like Megan Abbott? Beware the Woman is the work of a fearless cartographer of the darkest, seediest, most gloriously haunted landscapes of the human heart and psyche.” —Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog

“Beware the Woman proves yet again why Megan Abbott is a literary rock star. Feverish, razor sharp, and pulsing with dread, it’s a tale both timeless and terrifyingly of-the-moment.”
—Riley Sager, author of The House Across the LakeMegan Abbott is the award-winning author of eleven novels, including New York Times bestseller The Turnout, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, and The End of Everything. She received her PhD in literature from New York University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The Believer. She’s the cocreator and executive producer of USA’s adaptation of Dare Me, now on Netflix, and was a staff writer on HBO’s David Simon show The Deuce. Abbott lives in New York City.”We should go back,” he said suddenly, shaking me out of sleep.

“What?” I whispered, huddled under the thin bedspread at the motor inn, the air conditioner stuck on hi. “What did you say?”

“We could turn around and go back.”

“Go back?” I was trying to see his face in the narrow band of light through the stiff crackling curtains, the gap between every motel curtain ever. “We’re only a few hours away.”

“We could go back and just explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.”

His voice was funny, strained from the AC, the detergent haze of the room.

I propped myself up on my elbows, shaking off the bleary weirdness.

We had driven all day. In my head, in my chest, we were still driving, the road buzzing beneath us, my feet shaking, cramped, over the gas.

“But you wanted this,” I said, reaching for him. “You said we should go before the baby comes.”

He didn’t say anything, his back to me, the great expanse of his back, my hand on his shoulder blade.

“Jed,” I said. “What is it?”

“You’re dreaming,” he said, his voice lighter, changed. It was like a switch went off.

“What?” I said again, looking at the back of his head, lost in shadow.

“You were dreaming,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

A strange feeling came over me. It hadn’t been Jed at all. It had been some boogeyman shaking me awake, warning me to go back, go back.

Some boogeyman.

Like Captain Murderer, the smeary white man I used to dream about when I was little.

Captain Murderer.

Who? my mother used to ask me. Someone from one of your comic books, or a grown-up movie you snuck over to the Carnahans to see?

The Carnahans, with six kids from ages four to twenty-four, lived next door in a rambling house, and two of the Carnahan boys fed me warm beer in the basement once when I was ten, and another time I split my lip when one of the girls slammed a screen door on my face, and they loved to set off firecrackers in the driveway all summer long, once burning down the old sycamore everyone loved and it changed the light in our house forever.

But no, Captain Murderer didn’t come from the Carnahans’ big console TV, videogame cords dangling like spider legs. He didn’t come from my comic books or the slumber party stories swapped in our sleeping bags.

He didn’t come from anywhere at all. He was always already there.

But who is he? my mother kept asking, unease creeping into her voice.

Captain Murderer, I kept repeating because I assumed she knew him, too, deep down. Like the tooth fairy, the devil with his pitchfork and his flaming tail, like on the can label in the cupboard. Captain Murderer!

My mother, face drawn together in worry, would stop what she was doing, folding laundry or wiping glasses in the drying rack, and make me start at the beginning.

And I’d tell her how he was all white, white as milk, head to toe, with white nails and white lashes, teeth like little bones, and one red spot in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades.

How he moved like bedsheets snapping. How he bit you and his teeth popped out, leaving you with little bones under your skin that everyone would say was a mosquito bite, a fire ant, chiggers.

But where did he come from? my mother would plead. Was it a story someone told you at camp? Where did he come from?

Later those nights, after she thought I’d fallen back to sleep, I would hear her moving from room to room, checking all the locks on every window and door.

Click-click, click-click, bolt.

I would hear her breathing all through our little house.

Captain Murderer came from nowhere. But you couldn’t tell your mother that.

He came at night, for me.

Captain Murderer came for me!

***

Later, the hint of blue dawn, I felt for Jed’s wrist. Half lost in sleep, I clambered for him, the crazy, dream-thick thought: What if Captain Murderer got him?

But he was in the bathroom, the light under the door, the drone of the automatic fan.

When he came out, a blue shadow in that blue dawn, he stood at the foot of the bed looking at me, his face too dark to see. Only the flicker of the whites of his eyes, wide and wary. Somewhere, a snarl of mosquitoes buzzed, a light sizzling.

Jed, I said, my voice gluey with sleep.

His hands clenching at his sides, looking at me as if I were this strange thing, landed in his bed, come to do him harm or wonder, an alien, a ghost, a succubus.

Jed, sweet Jed, so nervous. My fingertips tingling.

Lifting the sheet, I told him to come inside and he put the heels of his hands on my legs and dragged me to the bottom of the bed, and it was like never before.

All our times, romantic and sticky whispers, but this time something else. Something blue and strange and piercing and I shuddered all through, my breaths catching against his ear.

Day One

We’d been driving forever, the Midwest finally sneaking up on us, the hard smack of road-salt as I-75 widened and widened again.

I’d never seen Jed so nervous. Excited. Both. It was hard to tell.

It was our first road trip together and everything felt impossibly fun: the oversized rental car-a toothpaste-white Chevy-lurching across the lanes, the burr of the air conditioner, the rest stops with the beef jerky and neon flip-flops, the toaster muffins in plastic wrap and the hot dogs slinking on an endless roller grill.

On the crinkly map we traced our route up the great paw of Michigan, I-75 snaking up the state like a wriggly vein.

Sometimes we sang along to indifferent radio. Lite FM and classic rock, the occasional Christian devotional show.

Sometimes we clasped hands clammy from shivering Big Gulps in the cupholders.

Sometimes we made long lists of baby names. We’d already decided we didn’t want to know the sex. We didn’t care, and just naming names made it feel glorious and impossible all over again, my hand on my belly.

I never even thought I’d have a baby, he was saying, and now here I am and it’s the rightest thing I’ve ever done, and we’re rattling off names, Jed rejecting my favorite, “Molly,” swiftly and without mercy, confessing finally that he was once sick with love over a girl named Molly Kee at summer camp when he was fifteen.

That can’t be true, I teased. You told me you’d never been in love before.

He had said it-I never forgot it-one muggy Sunday morning, both of us too tired to make coffee, our arms and legs entwined.

Well, you know, he said now, shrugging, smiling a little, caught.

Sick with love, the phrase so unlikely from his solid, square-jawed Midwestern mouth, the words made me inexplicably sad. Before I knew it, I was crying. My sunglasses sticky from it. It makes me feel silly and sad to think of it now. To feel so close, so encircled and encircling with love and yet…

Is it the hormones? That’s what he kept saying, hearing the hitch in my voice, sneaking anxious looks at me, wondering if he should pull over.

I’m fine, I sputtered, and then laughed even as the tears slathered me, and somehow he thought that meant keep going, because he kept going, talking about this Molly girl, how she had a chipped tooth that drove him crazy, and how she could land bullseye after bullseye at archery with a longbow she made herself, and how she sang “Coat of Many Colors” at the talent show, and what he would have done, back then, for one glancing touch of the back of her left knee.

Behind my sunglasses, I was crying and couldn’t stop and he kept going because he couldn’t see. Crying behind one’s sunglasses-is there anything lonelier than that?

Finally, my voice became a sob and then he looked at me and stopped the car, skittering up the shoulder.

Jacy, Jacy… what’s wrong? What did I do?

I wanted to say, Aren’t you sick with love for me?

What woman doesn’t want that, especially with her belly slowly swelling with their first child?

Why did I tell you that? he said at last, shaking his head, grabbing my hand, gripping it until all our fingers went white. I don’t know why I told you that.

And I felt silly. I was silly. The hormones, yes. The hormones are killing, killing.

It’s just the hormones, I swear.

Thirty-two years old, too old to be in love like this, with such teen ferocity and force, but that was how it was and there was no fighting it. Why would I?

I’ve had men in love with me before-high school Paul, the poet who used to bake me cookies, and Benjy, who broke both my heart and five front windows of the dorm I lived in. I’ve had men in love with me before, but it never felt like this. Never both of us in the same way at the same time, like two spiders sewing a silken web together.

***

After our city hall wedding, four months to the day we met, I remember walking into that impromptu party at that random Irish bar (the Bucket of Blood!) near the courthouse, walking as if I were floating, as if I were a queen entering a palace, a goddess entering heaven. It was all so haphazard and lovely, a clutch of friends hauling a Party City bag bursting with tissue streamers, birdseed confetti, plastic champagne flutes, hanging a curling Just Married sign above the steam tables, corned beef and cabbage for the day drinkers.

And after everyone had left and we were kicking up streamers under our feet as we dragged ourselves along the carpet, florid and undulating, I remember nearly tripping-an errant champagne stem snapped under my foot-and reaching for him, clutching the front of his shirt.

And I could feel his heart beating like a rabbit’s under my hand. Fast and frightened, pounding and alive and terrified.

It charmed me, moved me.

Here he was, a man so strong, so upright, a good man, a man born with certain advantages: middle-class comforts, a college fund, no dependents, a thirty-year-old white man, a craftsman who works with his hands, a solid and kind man with an artistic eye and artistic yearnings. You might think a man like that has never been acquainted with doubt, with fear, with desperation.

And yet. And yet.

I looked up at his face, a narrow slick of frosting on his collar from the cake-cutting-

I looked up at his face, my hand over his thundering heart-

And his eyes were shining with such love, I tell you.

I tell you, it was love. It was love, even if it scared him. The love scared him.

But the truth was Jed ran into the fire. That’s how he’d put it: with the proposal, the wedding, the look on his face when the pregnancy stick was still shivering in my hand. He ran into it, the fire, the fear. He said it made him feel alive.

He was looking at me, eyes blinking as if shaking off the sandman’s grit from them. Like my grandma when I was little, putting her cool hand over my crusted eyes.

He was looking at me, his face full of wonder-Could this be true? Could it? Could we be married? Could you be my wife?

He was looking at me like I’d saved his life. Which, he whispered to me in the blue-dark of our honeymoon suite hours later, I had.

I never thought this would happen to me, Jed told me that night, our wedding night. I’d given up on it happening.

When he said it, I thought, how strange for a man to feel that. To feel like a girl, waiting, waiting, like when all her friends at school got their first period, one by one, the tampons in their purse zipper pocket, the whispers about the ruby slick on their underpants and now they were women…

I was afraid I wasn’t made for it, he told me.

For marriage? I asked, smiling gently, nudging him, teasing. Or love?

For anything, he said. And that’s when I saw it in his eyes. How deep this went and how impenetrable it felt. How had I never known this. How-

For anything but being alone.

Most men are that way, sweetie, my mom always said. And it doesn’t change when they get married. They think if they get married, it’ll change it. You think that too. But they’re lone wolves, these kinds of men. Most men.

But that was my mother’s generation, the world they lived in, the world of women huddled in kitchens and over playpens, with their husbands at the grill, a ring of khakis, fingers clipping beer necks and busting chops over a bad trade, never able to connect, to relate, unless on the football field, on the ice, feelings forever unspoken, unspoiled.

Jacy went and married a signmaker! my mother shouted to Aunt Laraine when I called her, the two of them forever sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, sneaking cigarettes and beating their breasts over the news.

I had to explain, yet again, that Jed was not merely a signmaker. That neon is both an art and a science, and yes, while commissions-for the occasional casino, for food trucks, trendy hotels-and restorations were his primary income, he also worked on his own pieces (like the picture I sent you!) and on restoring grand old signs from back before jumbotrons and LED and plastic, back in the day when neon was king.

If you could see him in his studio, I wanted to say. Heating the glass tubes with torches, bending them into these glorious glowing creations. Manipulating voltage and gas, heat and pressure. The red of neon, the cool blue of argon. The inside of each tube coated with colored powder, the blending of colors. The scorching pinks and sizzling purples.

I remember when he first showed me. No gloves, he said, laying his hand on the radiant tube, its center flamed, his face glowing. Gloves get in the way.

How I gasped when he placed his hand on the searing glass. The hiss of the constant flame.

He had burned his hands countless times, patches on his palm, a knuckle, his thumb joint, like his hand had been put back together hastily. There were hard flaps on his skin where he could barely feel and I loved when they brushed against my cheek, between my thighs.

We made promises that night, our wedding night. We drained the bottle of Mumm’s—the one that appeared at our apartment in a misted bucket courtesy of my new father-in-law, whom I’d yet to meet. We drained the whole thing while Jed washed my hair over the sink to get all the confetti out, the bird seed.

His hands on my hair, the strength of those hands, their delicacy—a sculptor’s hands, a sculpture of heat and light—and I had to have him all over again, sinking to my knees on the soft pill of the bath rug.

The sweetness of him, the amniotic salt, the shudder that went through him.

It’s real and it’s forever, I told my mom over the phone, my mom half mute with shock.

Good, honey, she said, a choke in her voice. If you don’t think that now, you’re really in trouble.

Yes, it had happened fast. Too fast for our families to come to the wedding.

I had had to make amends to my mom, my cousins, my aunt and uncle.

But Jed only had his dad and his dad was traveling. I had the feeling they weren’t close, though it was hard to know.

The following week, we had dinner with him on our way out west for our honeymoon. And Jed was nervous, so nervous, but it had gone so well. Perfect, really.

He’s here, Jed said, his eyes bright, head bobbing, as we stood in the hotel lobby.

Under the garish chandelier, Jed’s dad stood, waving.

Doctor Ash, I said, so tentative.

I’d had this idea of him—from Jed’s stories, from the blurry father-and-son-at-graduation photo, radiator-curled, on Jed’s bookshelf—that he was an old-school dad, a Midwestern white dude, the kind all those fish-tackle and golf club Father’s Day cards are for.

So I was surprised how dapper he was, handsome like Jed, but Jed in nice clothing, a fine wool suit and stylish Italian loafers alongside Jed’s flannel and jeans.

His voice so low and gentle, a little burr in it, I felt instantly at ease. He started by teasing me gently about the sort of woman who’d take on an Ash man. Then he said he was sorry we hadn’t met before, but not to blame Jed. After all, he lived way up in the tippy top of Michigan, the vacation home of Jed’s childhood, and didn’t travel much in his early retirement. A lifetime of travel for work, he laughed, all I want to do is stay home, in my library, with my books and my bourbon.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.6500 × 5.4800 × 8.1600 in
Imprint	G.P. Putnam's Sons
ISBN-13	09780593084953
ISBN-10	0593084950
Author	Megan Abbott
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC022000
Subjects	thriller novels, FIC022000, domestic thriller, books for women, thriller books, suspense books, gifts for her, feminist books, psychological thrillers, best selling books for women, gifts for women, psychological horror, gothic book, megan abbott books, dare me, dark books, megan abbot, creepy books, books about pregnancy, the turnout, mystery, women, mental health, marriage, family, horror, love, thriller, motherhood, suspense, childhood, literary, FIC019000, beach reads, pregnancy, psychological thriller, thrillers, book club, Summer reads
Format	General Trade