Dangerous Women in Rebecca Baum’s The Brood
It’s a dangerous world to be a woman in Rebecca Baum’s The Brood—but the predators aren’t the male characters, who generally only make an appearance in this horror novel after they’re either dead or inescapably doomed. Instead, the shocking power of this tale comes from an utter breakdown of female solidarity, as women characters exploit, denigrate, abuse, and wreak violence on one another. The novel embodies an often-neglected corollary of writing strong, compelling female characters—not, as it’s sometimes envisioned, as a kind of writerly public service that aims to create positive role models, but truly allowing women to occupy their place on the full spectrum of Good and Evil.
Mary, the main character of The Brood, is a lawyer who’s built a successful career helping rich men escape the consequences of victimizing other women. One day, driving home from the funeral of a former mentor and lover, she gets lost in the woods of upstate New York. There, she falls into the clutches of a woman living in a remote cabin who refers to herself only as Girl, and who seems to have confused Mary with the abusive mother who abandoned her years ago. Trapped in this twisted, hateful relationship not of her making, Mary quickly finds out that she has something even worse to fear. Girl and her missing mother have a special relationship with the cicadas that inhabit the woods around the cabin, a vast swarm that collectively seem to form a sentient entity with a sinister, unknown purpose and whose reproductive cycle depends on living human flesh.
This is a book that can be read in one breathless sitting as Baum’s writing is propelled forward with skilful economy. She wastes little time setting the scene before throwing Mary into dire peril, and throughout the many plot twists she barely takes her foot off the accelerator. The plot’s essential elements won’t be especially surprising to any horror fan—the victim as an arrogant, naive city-slicker, and the rural, uneducated perpetrators who have a mystical connection to the land are fairly standard fare. But Baum makes good use of her material to unsettle and disturb, all while plumbing some unaccustomed insights.
The Brood seethes with body horror, calling forth all the senses to invoke visceral disgust, but the deepest terror comes from the specter of reproductive coercion: being forced to carry another life even as it inflicts irreversible damage to your own body. At the same time, the novel also forces readers to sit with the uncomfortable truth that hatred for women’s bodies—messy, vulnerable, impossible to control—is a weapon that is turned both outward, on other women, and inward on ourselves. Mary’s virulent scorn for Girl shares deep roots with her attempts to control her own body through dieting. Her cruelty and self-loathing are revealed as two sides of the same coin.
No character here is sympathetic—though Girl’s futile longing to be loved by her mother is certainly pitiable. She and Mary are both active participants in the same cycle of violence that robs them of agency and makes them helpless. All in all, it’s pretty grim stuff. But Baum clearly does not wish to leave us in despair. As she leads the reader deeper into the secrets of the cicada swarm, she works something of a magic trick to bring her characters an eleventh-hour redemption. As a reader, I was perhaps too convinced by the gritty, uncompromising violence that had led up to this point, and I found the shift in track was accomplished with a bit of creakiness; but the dramatic plot turn makes an undeniably powerful statement about what it will take for women to heal their minds and bodies from self-hatred. It is a statement that will linger in the mind after the book is finished.
Editor’s Note: The Brood was published in October 2025 by Thomas & Mercer. Support independent bookstores (and our journal) by purchasing through Bookshop.org.