Beware the Woman

Critics Review

• A haunted, woozy, suspenseful Midwest Gothic Noir … A slow-burning novel of almost unbearable tension … Megan Abbott is always essential reading

  Declan Hughes, Irish Times

• A splendidly tense and atmospheric homage to the Gothic tradition – a contemporary Rebecca
  amid the Great Lakes

  John Williams, Mail on Sunday

• Abbott ratchets up the menace towards an unexpected ending in a claustrophobic chiller about how men deny women agency

  Guardian, Books of the Month - Crime & Thrillers

• A feminist fable as well as a psychological thriller with horror hints … What initially looks set to be a
  reworking of Rebecca becomes instead an incisive parable of today’s America, where superficially nice men are reasserting their former control over women’s reproductive choices

  Sunday Times

• Megan Abbott is quite rightly considered to be psycho thriller royalty … Abbott’s writing is as intense and
  energetic … Every page is laced with quiet menace

  Daily Mail

• Megan Abbott is a masterful builder of mood, her voluptuous prose heavy with sex and weather

  New York Times Book Review

• Timely and terrifying

  People

• Imagine Get Out but with feminist themes . . . Dripping with tense confrontations, curiously dead wives, and the gendered expectations that accompany both. It’s a suspenseful page-turner

  Vulture

• With this bewitchingly creepy tale, thriller queen Megan Abbott keeps readers questioning whether this family getaway is the stuff of anxiety dreams or Bluebeard nightmares

  Oprah Daily

• Do not read this brilliant (but dark) book with the lights off

  The Sun

• Scintillating and chilling from start to finish

  Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

• Terrific at finding dread around every corner, at making you see the grotesque and frightening in something previously mundane…Beware the Woman is a master class in suspense

  Seattle Times

• A cabin-fever suspense novel laced with menacing Rosemary’s Baby-ish undertones

  Philadelphia Enquirer

• Extraordinary. Rosemary’s Baby midwifed by Mrs Danvers. Megan Abbott is a genius. has that feeling of being a book that will be read 100 years from now and marvelled over. A true classic

  Sarah Hilary, author of THORN

• Sultry, subversive, shades of Rebecca in a menacing, Gothic exploration of threats to female bodily autonomy, which may be current but have been sadly ever so. I loved it

  Harriet Tyce, author of It Ends at Midnight

• Abbott is a superstar of the suspense genre. . . . Beware the Woman is Rebecca wedded to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Along with the feverish psychological twists and turns that Abbott’s novels are celebrated for, Beware the Woman explores the timely topic of women’s autonomy over their own bodies

  NPR

• Megan Abbott can do no wrong. Stunningly twisty, Beware the Woman so deftly holds some of the most pressing feminist issues of our time in an eerie, ominous grip. Bodily autonomy, reproduction, patriarchal power-this thriller feels terrifyingly of the moment, and perhaps that’s where the truest horror lies

  Ashley Audrain, author of The Push

• Beware the Woman proves yet again why Megan Abbott is a literary rock star. Feverish, razor sharp, and pulsing with dread, it’s a tale both timeless and terrifyingly of-the-moment

  Riley Sager, author of The House Across the Lake

• Is there anyone like Megan Abbott? BEWARE THE WOMAN is the work of a fearless cartographer of the darkest, seediest, most gloriously haunted landscapes of the human heart and psyche

  Kelly Link

• Beware the Woman is Megan Abbott at her best, which is about as good as it gets. A modern-day Gothic, it is chilling and creepy, feverish and surreal, and compulsively readable

  Laura Lippman, author of Prom Mom

• Spectacular. Her best yet. Kind of Rosemary’s Baby meets Rebecca. Nobody, but nobody does creeping dread like Megan Abbott does

  Sam Baker

• Spine-tingling . . . Manipulating the sense of menace like a virtuoso violinist, Abbott expertly foreshadows the wrenching family secrets that are exposed in a ferocious finale. Sinewy prose and note-perfect pacing make this a masterful and provocative deep dive into desire, love, and gender politics. Readers will be left breathless

  Publishers Weekly, starred review

• Megan Abbott masterfully uses the pretext of a pregnant woman’s heightened senses…to build a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity reminiscent of GET OUT. You’re sure to get chills. An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense

  Kirkus Reviews

• An absolutely brilliant novel: I now want to read the entire Megan Abbott oeuvre

  Tablet