What I learned from… ‘Mother of Serpents’ by John R Gordon
About the book
About the bookBrooklyn-based poet DuVone Mapley-Stevenson is already struggling with fragile mental health when his white husband Jack gets a promotion that means them relocating to all-white Kwawidokawa County, upstate Maine. At first it seems this could be a fresh start for the financially-stretched family, even if the house Jack has found them is suspiciously cheap.
Determined to make the most of the move for the sake of their young son, stay-at-home dad Vone is at once destabilised by the racial, cultural and geographic isolation. When strange sights and sounds start to press in on him, he initially doesn’t dare share with Jack what he at first assumes must be recurring delusive thinking. And then he starts to fear that the increasingly threatening uncanny phenomena are real.
As a series of terrifying events begin to tear apart the boundaries between sanity and reality, myth and science, Vone finds himself fighting a life-and-death battle with both the monsters who roam the mind and those that slither across the boundaries between their worlds and our own…
What I learned
Mother of Serpents is that rare thing: a novel that takes established horror tropes and spins them into something original, adding more layers of fear and dread along the way. It follows Vone, his husband Jack and their son Jay-Jay as they move from multicultural Brooklyn to an all-white community in Maine. The sense of being out of place in a threatening new environment is ramped up by Vone’s racial and cultural isolation, and the fact that he’s left to supervise the couple’s young son alone in an increasingly threatening environment. There’s also the ongoing issue of Vone’s own fragile mental health, and his and Jack’s fears that he’s starting to unravel again. With so many ingredients at play, the author makes us care deeply for Vone from the off – and fear for the safety of the whole family.
The sense of impending horror is established with historical news reports and journal entries at the start of the book, paving the way for the trap Vone is about to walk into. There’s clearly something very malign at work in the house. It’s sinister, unfamiliar, full of dark corners, strange objects that may or may not be symbols or warnings. The woods outside the house are full of danger. And worse of all, there are inexplicable shapes at play; shadows and creatures that move, that may or may not be real. Vone has to nagivate this terrifying new world while trying to keep his son, and his sanity, intact.
By the point the horror breaks out, the author has ramped up the tension so effectively that the book is unputdownable.
It’s very rare to find a book that presents horror from a Black, gay perspective so well. The racial and cultural difference of Vone in a new, threatening environment manages to magnify the reader’s fear through an original, terrifying lens.
More about this book
Published in 2024 by Team Angelica
Mother of Serpents at Amazon.co.uk
Mother of Serpents at Waterstones
About ‘What I learned…’
I read anything and everything and think there’s writing inspiration to take from from books of every genre.