In an afterword, Zoje Stage recounts that she started writing MOTHERED in April 2020, just when the early novelty and fellow-feeling of lockdown had begun to erode: "positivity started to sour and then rot, and what was left was a simmering sense of doom." Stage notes that the pandemic she depicts in her novel is not exactly COVID, though it bears many resemblances to that time in 2020, when no one was exactly sure how the virus spread, when vaccines and tests were not yet available, and the fear of losing someone was ever-present, even as the boredom and claustrophobia continued to mount. And, as Stage notes, it was personal --- she lost her own mother to COVID.

"The unsettled nature of the reading experience mirrors Grace's psyche, perfectly recreating those surreal pandemic days when time seemed absurdly fluid and reality felt increasingly difficult to pin down."

So MOTHERED is a peculiar kind of catharsis, but perhaps one that makes sense to a writer of psychological horror. Stage’s main character, Grace, is a single woman in her mid-30s. She's been working as a hair stylist for most of her adult life, and just before the pandemic started, she had finally saved up enough money to buy her own small house in a decent Pittsburgh neighborhood. But when ongoing stay-at-home orders prompt the salon owner to take early retirement, it becomes clear that Grace is going to need some help paying her mortgage. Then her recently widowed mother, Jackie, reaches out with a proposal. Jackie has been sick and is lonely after her husband's death. What if she were to move into Grace's spare room for the remainder of the pandemic?

Grace is relieved at the prospect of her mother taking on some of the financial responsibility, even if she's a bit nervous about losing her independence and privacy, especially her ability to engage in her hobby of catfishing younger women, posing as a benevolent older man and offering kindly advice. Nevertheless, she tries to view this new development as an opportunity to bridge the gulf that has grown between them ever since the death of her sister, Hope, nearly 25 years earlier. Grace and Hope were identical twins, at least genetically, though Hope had cerebral palsy and was always Grace's intellectual superior.

Grace hasn't thought too much about Hope in the intervening years and has even stopped making annual pilgrimages to her gravesite. But almost as soon as Jackie moves in, Grace starts to have incredibly vivid and disturbing dreams that straddle a fine line between memory and nightmare, soon causing her to question her grip on reality.

MOTHERED is the pandemic horror novel that I'm not sure we would have been ready for two years ago. Stage effectively captures the isolation and suspicion of those early months of lockdown, as well as the claustrophobia of being trapped in the same set of small rooms with another person whose presence sometimes seems intolerable. Many people reported having unusually vivid and bizarre dreams at that time. Stage definitely incorporates that phenomenon too, amping up the intensity of a real-life experience until it becomes, in her version, truly horrific.

Adding to the mounting feeling of dread is the way that Stage effectively brings readers into Grace's experience. Just as Grace is constantly unsure about the line between her waking life and her dream life, so too is the audience never quite sure if the narrative is exploring a straightforward memory or experience, or if it’s about to turn dark and gruesome. The unsettled nature of the reading experience mirrors Grace's psyche, perfectly recreating those surreal pandemic days when time seemed absurdly fluid and reality felt increasingly difficult to pin down.