Amy Lukavics

-- 4.5 stars --

The Lord works in mysterious ways, all right. Wish a baby dead, get another one in return as punishment. This is my reckoning.

Cat Winters nails it in the cover blurb: Daughters Unto Devils is what Stephen King's take on Little House on the Prairie might look like. Faced with the prospect of riding out yet another harsh winter in their tiny, remote mountain cabin, the Verner family - Susan and Edmund (Ma and pa), and their children Hannah, Joanna, Charles, Emily, and Amanda - show more decide to strike out for the prairie. (Actually it's less of a collective decision than a mandate from the patriarch, but wev.) Rumor has it that there a bunch of abandoned homesteads ripe for the picking. Recovering from a mental breakdown/possible demonic possession and newly pregnant thanks to an illicit affair with the postal boy, eldest child Amanda welcomes the fresh start. But it seems that the devil has followed their humble little caravan....either that, or the prairie is home to its own breed of evil.

Lukavics seamlessly blends psychological thriller with paranormal horror in a way that keeps you guessing: is Amanda merely suffering from the aftereffects of cabin fever (not to mention sleep deprivation, on account of the new baby, who is deaf and blind and understandably frustrated and terrified) - or is she really being hounded by the devil and his minions?

Lukavics peppers the story with so many great little details: Henry and his ghost stories; the Verners' willful ignorance about the blood on their cabin walls (who on God's green earth would choose to slaughter an ox inside their home? oh wait!); the carnivorous pigs (that one Bones episode!); the ending, which literally make me gasp out loud.

The quaint language is both amusing...and a little unsettling, when paired with the blood and gore. But perhaps the scariest thing of all is how little our equally archaic attitudes about premarital sex and unplanned pregnancy have changed. Naturally it's Amanda and Amanda alone who is left to suffer the consequences of her dalliance with Henry. Throughout the story, the goings-on feel like Amanda's punishment for daring to have sex out of wedlock - and then not wanting the baby that's sure to follow. Happily, the ending rejects this trope. (Or at least my reading does. I guess you could take it a number of ways.)

Daughters Unto Devils is creepy AF and kept me reading well into the night. Major bonus points for the feminist elements, as well as the cliffhanger ending that I'm sure to have nightmares about for weeks to come.

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The Cane family looks perfect from the outside: 5 perfect sisters (Juliet, Taylor, Anya, Mona, and Rose) with a military dad and and a stay at home mom. In reality, they are barely holding it together. Their mother has more bad days than good, opting to stay in bed for days on end with a steady supply of booze and on better days seems to purposefully ruin the girls' lives. Their de facto mom, the eldest daughter Juliet, is abusive in her own way, flying into rages and physically abusing her show more sisters when they don't blindly follow her. On Rose's birthday, Juliet and their mom clash as they have never before. The tragic result is Rose's fall down the stairs where she breaks her neck. Their mom claims to know how to bring her back and returns with the same Rose with a bruised neck. Unfortunately the ritual wasn't complete and Rose hungers for something more than food.

The Ravenous tells a realistic story amidst the supernatural and horror elements. Mona is the main character and the second youngest of the five girls. She feels rather alone because Taylor idolizes Juliet and sticks by her always, Anya throws herself into weed and her relationship, and Rose is the baby of the family that everyone tries to protect. Because of the constant moving around and the different types of abuse in the family, they are insular, opting to completely shun other people and cultivate that perfect facade to escape suspicious. Underneath it all, Mona is not ok and falls into many of the same coping mechanisms as her mom, like drinking to dumb the pain. Mona is kind of the odd one out due to trying to expose the abuse as a kid and the others always treat her badly as a result. I felt for her so much and many of her coping mechanisms and behavior range true to me.

The mother and Juliet are battling matriarchs of the family who are both abusive in their own ways. The mother has depression that causes her to stay in bed for days at a time. Because she wants to keep the facade of being perfect to the father, who is only there a few weeks out the year, she doesn't seek treatment. Instead, she drowns herself with alcohol and generally ruins the girls' lives with broken promises, passive aggressive remarks, emotional abuse, and gaslighting. Nothing is ever her fault and nothing is every good enough for her. Juliet, on the other hand, is incredibly bitter and angry due to passing up a full scholarship at Julliard to take care of her sisters. She expects to be followed without question and doesn't hesitate to physically abuse her sisters or guilt them in any way possible into following her. The mother and Juliet hate each other because Juliet has taken over and the mother has basically abandoned her children. Honestly both people have understandable emotions that turn into ugly, harmful actions. This was my favorite part of the novel.

Once the tragic accident has happened, the mother whisks Rose's corpse away and hours later brings her back magically alive once again. Unfortunately, she's not quite the same. The bruising around her neck from where it broke looks deep and permanent and dark veins all over her skin. She can't keep down normal food and craves only an odd type of meat that their mother brought home only for her. Rose seems fine for while, but then starts to become hungry again, ravenously so, with rot spreading over her body and the impulse to eat getting harder and harder to control. Rose's transformation from one of the sweetest human beings on the planet to a flesh eating zombie was chilling and memorable. In terms of the family drama, this symbolizes what abuse does to the most vulnerable and innocent of their family.

The Ravenous is a hard read because the abuse portrayed feels so realistic. The urge to appear perfect, the silence even though everyone knows what's going on, the unspoken agreement to keep secrets, and the variety of ways each of the girls copes with it all feel very real. One aspect didn't feel so real, having to do with Juliet. It was the lone thing that didn't fit in this well written novel. I've read other of Lukavics' books, but none of them landed with me as much as this one did. The zombie elements are well done alongside the family drama and it all fits together so perfectly. show less

Daughters Unto Devils by Amy Lukavics is a chilling horror novel that ever so slightly reminds one of the Little House books but this one totally embraces the dark side. Sixteen year old Amanda is the oldest child in her family, she and her family live in a small cabin in the woods. She has been meeting a boy in secret but now that she is pregnant, he has left her to deal with the consequences on her own. The last winter was a very difficult one for the family as they were snowed in for show more months. Their pregnant mother was sick and gave birth to a deaf and blind child, and Amanda goes a little stir-crazy and believes she saw a devil coming for her.

Her Pa decides to move the family to the prairies where he assures them they will have a better life and winters will be easier. They find an empty cabin but something terrible has happened there as the inside is coated with blood. They clean up the cabin and move in, but their troubles have just started. The author gives us plenty of horror along with the blood and gore. Building on the isolation they are experiencing Amanda has feelings of being watched, or thoughts of possession by devils or other evil.

Daughters Unto Devils is an effective horror story that made me feel uneasy and chilled. The author slowly builds the creepiness until you are not sure exactly what is happening or who to trust but there is no denying the creepy atmosphere or the sense of doom that is building as the book goes along. This is a debut novel and if you enjoy good horror, Amy Lukavics is surely an author to watch out for. show less

The Women in the Walls are no Devilish Daughters

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through Edelweiss.)

So ever since I found Walter dead, I’ve been acting as if nothing happened, even though on the inside I’m beginning to unravel, slowly, like a thread being pulled painstakingly from its spool. Something isn’t right in this house.

So I saw that one early reviewer read Daughters Unto Devils and The Women in the Walls back-to-back, and thought it a pretty swell show more idea; after all, Daughters has been in my TBR pile for going on a year now, and what better time to read it than an Amy Lukavics binge? Now that I've finished, I'm not entirely sure it was the best move. I really enjoyed Daughters, and Women was a bit of a letdown by comparison; but, had I read Women first, it's quite likely that Daughters would have taken a drastic hit in priority. So it's a bit of a toss-up.

Both books have the same general vibe, but whereas Daughters masterfully balanced psychological suspense with supernatural horror - creating a tension between the two and sowing doubt in the reader's mind as to what's real and what's imagined - Women tips the scales heavily in favor of the paranormal, and pretty early on, too. And I think the story suffers for it; there's just not the same feeling of pressure and something's-gotta-give anxiety.

Maybe it's the setting, too; whereas the Verners were trapped together in a tiny little mountain cabin (and then a slightly larger, yet even more isolated, prairie homestead), Women takes place on a sprawling estate, where the three remaining members of the Acosta family can go days without laying eyes on one another. When the shit goes down and a police officer is nowhere to be seen - a point Lucy presses her father on continuously - you kind of wonder why she doesn't just pick up the phone and call someone? Or use the internet? The estate's disconnectedness from the real world had me wondering if maybe Women was set in another time or world. But nope! Eventually we learn that Google does indeed exist, yet email is apparently beyond our hero's grasp. It's a real head-scratcher.

Lukavics mastered the slow burn with Daughters; while it's clear that Women is shooting for a similar feel, the story is way too drawn out, even tedious at times. (I considered DNF'ing around the 69% mark, but the power of Patty Daughters compelled me forward.) It's also ~70 pages longer, so.

In a similar vein, the ending of Women is much less ambiguous and more clearly spelled out for us than in Daughters. Sometimes coy conclusions frustrate me, but in Daughters the uncertainty fit nicely with the rest of the story. Women's ending kind of pales in contrast. There's nothing held back, no puzzles to keep your mind running circles at night.

There are some other elements I though Women could do without. The whole country club thing is weird and confusing and never fully resolved (or at least not to my satisfaction; what is it that the club does, again?). I feel like maybe Lukavics was trying to make a statement about wealth and class and privilege - similar to how she addressed sexual double standards in Daughters - but if there's a point here, I'm afraid it went over my head. The characters alternate between having zero personality - or being wholly unlikable. Lucy and Margaret, for example, mock the country club wives for their vanity and obsession with wealth and reputation - yet they treat the cook's kid Vanessa like garbage. Hypocrites much?

Overall, The Women in the Walls is an okay enough read. Some of the imagery is pretty great - jars of teeth; a skittering, Cicada-like creature; a mysterious, haphazard cemetery with unmarked tombs; legs and arms and heads served on THE GOOD CHINA - and Lukavics has a pretty wicked imagination. I'd love to crack her noggin open and see what else is lurking inside.

Maybe it's not entirely fair to compare her freshman and sophomore books, but reading them so close together, it's kind of hard not to. The curse of misplaced expectations strikes again!

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