TL;DR: Emma Cleary’s debut grafts body horror onto a story about sisters so emotionally precise it would work without a single supernatural element. The prose is lush, the dread is earned, and the final act is a full-contact nightmare that grows from real tenderness. Slow to ignite, but once it catches, Our Monstrous Bodies / Afterbirth burns a shape you won’t forget.

About a third of the way through Our Monstrous Bodies Brooke, our narrator, presses her fingers into her sister Izzy’s swollen abdomen and feels the fibroid cyst shift beneath her skin. She describes it as “a spare knee or something.” Izzy snorts. The exchange is funny and tender and a little bit nauseating, and it is doing about six things at once, which is more or less the operating frequency of this entire novel.

Brooke, twenty-seven, queer, recently back at her parents’ house after a teaching stint in Japan and a gutting breakup, flies to Vancouver to help her older half-sister Izzy recover from surgery to remove a uterine growth. Walk the dog, make noodles, be a warm body in the apartment. Instead, Izzy’s routine myomectomy goes catastrophically wrong and becomes an emergency hysterectomy, the dog vanishes, a terrifying elderly neighbor named Medusa keeps materializing inside their locked apartment, and Brooke’s own body begins to betray her in ways that feel increasingly impossible. Cleary takes this slow domestic burn and ratchets it into something feral and mythic without ever fully abandoning the realist register. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it really fucking works.

Cleary writes with a textural density that borders on obsessive: the mint-green bathtub, the pink grit ringing the tub, the parma violets smell of old ladies’ handbags. It creates a world you can almost taste, which matters enormously once that world starts to curdle. At its best, the writing has a quality like touching something in the dark and slowly realizing it’s alive. At its worst, it trips over its own richness. There are passages in the back half where the momentum is screaming forward but the prose wants to stop and layer one more image, and the tension sags just enough for the spell to wobble. Cleary is plainly in love with language, and most of the time that love is contagious, but she hasn’t quite learned when to kill her darlings and let a scene just rip.

Emma Cleary is a Liverpool-born, Vancouver-based writer who serves as editor-in-chief of Geist, one of Canada’s more interesting literary magazines. She holds both a PhD in literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and her short fiction has appeared in Best British Short Stories and the James Baldwin Review. The novel was developed under the working title All Those Strangers and acquired in a three-publisher deal by HarperCollins Canada, Borough Press in the UK, and Harper in the US, where it’s published as Afterbirth. You can feel the literary-academic DNA in the book’s architecture, the way it braids horror cinema and visual art and fairy tale into the sisters’ story, but it never reads like a dissertation. This is a debut that reads like someone who’s been thinking about these ideas for a very long time, and the fact that she built it during an MFA makes its ambition feel earned rather than reckless.

The horror operates on a principle of contamination. Brooke watches The Babadook, Ringu, Don’t Look Now, and the imagery starts bleeding into her waking life. Cleary is explicit about the mechanism, and it could feel heavy-handed but mostly doesn’t because Brooke’s relationship with these films is so specific, filtered through her ex-girlfriend Cecelia’s obsession with “mommy horror.” The scariest moments aren’t the supernatural ones. They’re the ones where bodies do what bodies do: bleed, swell, expel, betray. The image of Izzy’s hospital gown with its single tiny brown bloodstain next to her ashen face. The scene where Brooke and James have sex and something goes horribly wrong at the mirror, her reflection warping into something ancient while he recoils. Izzy late in the novel holding up tiny yellow knitted booties and saying “Aren’t they cute?” and the bottom dropping clean out of everything, warmth curdled to menace. These scenes will stick to the inside of your skull.

The sister dynamic is the engine. Brooke and Izzy are eleven years apart, their relationship built on love and resentment and mutual incomprehension that Cleary renders with painful accuracy. You believe every step because Cleary has laid the emotional groundwork with such patience. Where it loses me is in pacing. Part One is long. There’s a stretch of maybe sixty pages that feels like it’s accumulating atmosphere at the expense of forward motion, and I spent a chunk of the early book thinking okay, I trust you, can we go now? The novel could lose thirty pages up front and be tighter for it. James, Brooke’s love interest, also feels underserved. He’s compelling on the page, but his arc trails off rather than resolves.

This isn’t a book for everyone. It’s slow to start, deliberately ambiguous about its own supernatural rules, and viscerally uncomfortable in ways that will test some readers. But it’s one of the most distinctive horror debuts I’ve read in a while, a book that uses the genre as a lens for looking at things too painful to examine directly: grief, bodily autonomy, the violence of reproductive medicine, the way sisters can love each other and still become each other’s monsters. Cleary is a real talent, and I will read whatever the hell she writes next.