Usually we have a thing here about how we’ll spoil any damn piece of horror media we want. But sometimes folks just don’t want those deep-divey spoiler-ridden essays. Sometimes you just want to know if a movie is worth watching or a book is worth reading. You’ll find our Judgments here.

As we continue to grow our outlet, we’ve decided to also launch a new review section, which we’re calling Judgments. We won’t give you a rating scale with stars or tomatoes or skulls or whatever--just not our thing. Instead, we’re offering our thoughts and telling you if we think something is worth your attention. Today, we’re kicking off with Neha's Mother, a supernatural horror novel by Isaac Hans, published in 2020.

Andrei had been something of a bro in college, going to frat parties and picking up drunk girls for casual sex. When his wild youth began to taper, though, he started a career as a car salesman for a Mercedes dealership. There, he met his wife Lakshmy, who, despite having a successful dental practice and being in her late twenties, was still living at home with her mother and overbearing father. Years later, Lakshmy is out of the picture, leaving Andrei a single dad who would do anything to protect their three-year-old girl Natalia, whose family name is Neha.

Neha’s Mother is a domestic horror story, in which Andrei is, indeed, a constant protector, first for his sister Elvira, then for Lakshmy, and now for Natalia. And there’s much to defend against. The threats are endless, all coming from the outside in: potential rapists, bigots, muggers, and of course, ghosts and other supernatural entities.

With Natalia, though, the narrator tells us, “his protectiveness had never been tested or proven.” Neha’s Mother is just that: a long test of Andrei's ability and willingness to protect his daughter, regardless of cost. Hans delivers that test in a highly cinematic style, in which the narration often feels like a camera in a supernatural horror movie--lingering to build suspense, zooming in on characters to bring the terrors they suffer into grotesque living color, and hiding its monsters in shadow until the book’s chaotic climax.

But Neha’s Mother isn’t just about action and gore. It’s also intensely focused on character, sometimes to a fault. Andrei comes across as an anti-hero. From the beginning, you get glimpses of how his instincts often lead him to extreme violence and a constant stream of lies to “protect” his loved ones. He’s also a not-quite-reformed womanizer, who still looks at the women he slept with in college as sluts (though he never uses the word), never once considering that he engaged in the same behavior.

Even the seemingly inconsequential side characters are fleshed out and fully realized. Several passages come from the perspective of outsiders looking in, from strangers and acquaintances who find themselves trapped in the demonic web spiraling around Andrei and Natalia. Often, those strangers are doomed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time or for catching the unfortunate attention of the sinister force whose eyes are on Andrei’s daughter.

And while these chapters and passages dedicated to these characters sometimes add to the cinematic quality of the narration, they also overburden the book’s structure, benching interesting material, sometimes, for tens of pages, just to tell the backstories of (and to gruesomely kill off) characters who are essentially irrelevant to the rest of the story.

Andrei’s a difficult character to pull off as a protagonist, and Hans deserves some praise for making it work. You root for Andrei, not because you want him to win, but because his losing would mean the death of an innocent three-year-old girl. It’s discomfiting, but in a good and interesting way: Andrei’s always trying to save the day, but in the most violent, deceptive, or coercive ways possible. On occasion, though, it seems almost as if the book is sympathizing with and defending his misogyny and monstrous paternalism. But that’s the danger of anti-heroes. Even when they’re well-rendered--maybe especially when they’re well-rendered--they’re often uncomfortable characters to follow.

Case in point: there’s a distracting focus on brand name clothing and cars that starts to come across as class snobbery. Of course, Andrei’s a Mercedes salesman, so the automotive fixation makes sense, but it’s overdone.

The constant references to Louis Vuitton purses, Calvin Klein shirts, Rolex watches, Brunello Cicinelli suits, Berluti loafers, and “a black leather Gucci signature belt” at first feel like odd choices that could also be chalked up to character fixations, but as the book goes on, those fixations get contrasted with outside threats coming mostly from the working class and poor folks: vagrants, hitchhikers, truckers, and homeless people.

Those aren’t the only threats, nor even the primary ones, but they’re frequent, and when they’re put up against high-end cars and fashion and the fact that the main characters are all relatively rich, they start to feel like class judgments embedded in the book itself. Then again, those main characters are the root of all the terrible things that happen in the novel, so it’s possible that our interpretation doesn’t align with the author’s intent.

Class markers aside, ultimately, this is a story about what happens when a parent’s efforts to protect their child from harsh reality warps into something more sinister, something corrupted that threatens to twist them into a monster. The book could have been trimmed down considerably and would have benefited from more thoughtful engagement with the issues of class and gender that arise. But in the end, for fans of anti-heroes, supernatural horror, and tales of ghosts and possession, Neha’s Mother offers a compelling, character-focused, cinematic affair.