Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente)

Comfort Me With Apples
Catherynne M. Valente
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Every morning, Sophia wakes knowing that her life is perfect. How could it not be? She lives in the paradise of Arcadia Gardens, an exclusive gated community. She has numerous friends. She has the biggest and most beautiful home. And she has the best husband, respected by all, who surely loves her as dearly as she loves him. She was practically made for him.
Then she finds the locked drawer with the hairbrush and the lock of hair - neither of them hers.
Though her friends assure her nothing could be wrong, that she's just being silly (isn't her husband always telling her how silly she is?), doubts begin to slip into her mind, magnified when she finds more things out of place, more hints that something is amiss in her idyllic life. Just who - or what - is she married to? And what will happen if he learns that she suspects him?

REVIEW: As one might guess from the title and the early parts of the story, this is a twist on the tale of the Garden of Eden, transposing the Garden into a surreal vision of suburbia that manages to be utopian and dystopian simultaneously. She meets friends like Mrs. Lion and Mrs. Mink and Mrs. Fish, and though the writing never outright describes them as beasts it soon becomes clear that, normal as Sophia sees their visits for tea and gossip, they're not ordinary housewives, and neither is Sophia herself. From finding the strange hairbrush, Sophia begins to see the truth of Arcadia, the deference and the terror in the eyes of those she thought of as friends. Intermittent excerpts from the HOA rules, each more draconian than the last, add to the growing horror. There's a dreadful inevitability to how the story must end as it exposes the twisted roots behind a creation myth that reduces women to disposable things and justifies masculine abuse of power as stemming from the very highest authority. As with pretty much everything of Valente's I've read thus far, the prose positively sings, and even though it ran darker than I might have preferred, and it was relatively short (only a couple hours and change, audiobook time), it can't help but be memorable in the way a nightmare is memorable.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Echo Wife (Sarah Gailey) - My Review
The Murders of Molly Southbourne (Tade Thompson) - My Review
Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review