I wanted to love this. A menopausal FMC possibly going unhinged in a small town with cult vibes sounds like exactly the book I want to read. And it started off that way. But, somewhere in the middle it felt a bit to me like stuffing as many horror elements as possible into a narrative and it lost what it had built for me. I loved Mary's aunt as a character though. She was gross and crude and hilarious. And while I appreciated the author's self-aware afterward about the challenges of writing about menopause as a cisgender male, I still think that maybe that's not the subject for men to write about 🤷🏻‍♀️