Book Review: When the Devil by Emma E. Murray

“Life’s just two sides of a coin: violence and pleasure.”

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This sapphic, Southern horror novelette tells the story of Libby, a young woman grieving the loss of her grandmother, her sole light in a dim world composed of her abusive and unfaithful husband, vicious grandfather, and unfriendly community. Born into a legacy of ignorance, savagery, contempt, and toxic masculinity where women are treated as trash, objects of disdain, and literal punching bags, Libby lives a brutal, stagnant, isolated, and utterly oppressed existence as an unappreciated housewife where violence is a mundanity. Nothing she does is enough, and she doesn’t believe that she deserves better, nor that anything greater exists.

Hope and opportunity are foreign concepts, as are respect, kindness, safety, and bodily autonomy. Religion is used as a suffocating, unyielding, and misogynistic source of power, shame, and suppression — a hypocritical, backwoods means of keeping “nonconformists” in line — rendering Libby depressed and miserable. Until an enigmatic and potentially dangerous stranger named June moves in next door and upends everything, giving her transformative moments of desire, beauty, happiness, and pleasure. Can Libby embrace her new relationship, face the God who has forsaken her, trust that life has more to offer, and ultimately find salvation?

When the Devil lays an incredible groundwork of backstory, character, plot, and setting in only 66 pages, weaving a chilling, believable, addictive, engaging, and anxiety-inducing account of trauma, mortality, murder, revenge, and empowerment — a gorgeous, harrowing, and immersive tale of abuse, fear, freedom, and potential that both grips and guts the reader. It’s at once an intensely disheartening and deeply satisfying read where the downtrodden must fight for liberation.

Thank you to Shortwave Publishing for providing a free digital ARC of this forthcoming release, which hits shelves on May 7, 2024.

❤Amanda