Suspiciously Specific Grief-fiction: My deceased loved-one turned into a creature...
- The Fiction Fox
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
My Suspiciously Specific Recommendations for February will themed around a topic that’s close to my heart this time of year: grief. Not only does February mark some significant dates and anniversaries in relation to my personal grief, but it also feels like the perfect time of year for the subject matter: gloomy, cold and dark, but with days that are ever so slowly lengthening again towards summer. In this mini-series, I’ll share some grief-themed books, clustered by suspiciously-specific subgenre.
This week: books that feature grief as a transformation. Hear me out: this will make sense along the way...
Genre: Young Adult, magical realism
Pagecount: 462 pages
A teenage girl is convinced that when her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Genre: middle-grade, contemporary
Pagecount: 272 pages
A twelve year old boy finds comfort in the believe that his brother has turned into a dragonfly, after his passing.
Twelve-year-old Kingston James is sure his brother Khalid has turned into a dragonfly. When Khalid unexpectedly passed away, he shed what was his first skin for another to live down by the bayou in their small Louisiana town. Khalid still visits in dreams, and King must keep these secrets to himself as he watches grief transform his family.
It would be easier if King could talk with his best friend, Sandy Sanders. But just days before he died, Khalid told King to end their friendship, after overhearing a secret about Sandy—that he thinks he might be gay. "You don't want anyone to think you're gay too, do you?"
But when Sandy goes missing, sparking a town-wide search, and King finds his former best friend hiding in a tent in his backyard, he agrees to help Sandy escape from his abusive father, and the two begin an adventure as they build their own private paradise down by the bayou and among the dragonflies. As King's friendship with Sandy is reignited, he's forced to confront questions about himself and the reality of his brother's death.
Genre: magical realism, contemporary
Pagecount: 256 pages
Haunted by her sister’s death, our protagonist starts to believe that her beloved sibling has returned to her —in the form of a ghost fish.
Ghost Fish is a coming of age story of a 23-year-old woman in desperate need for a fresh start. She’s recently moved to New York, trying to leave the recent losses and bereavement she suffered behind her in her hometown. Alone in an unfamiliar town, barely making rent as a restaurant-hostess, Alison finds herself haunted in more ways than one. One night on her way home, she senses a strange shape in the air: a ghost-fish. Without any hesitation, Alison knows this is the ghost of her deceased sister, who drowned at sea. Unable to lose her sister for a second time, she traps the Ghostfish in a pickle-jar and takes it home.
Genre: magical realism, contemporary
Pagecount: 416 pages
A woman mourns the imminent loss of her husband, who's afflicted with a terminal degenerative illness that slowly transforms him into a great white shark.
For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will transform into that of a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist's heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams.
An emotional exploration of motherhood, marriage, transformation, and letting go, Shark Heart is an unforgettable love story about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, animals and people--all while examining what it truly means to be human.
Genre: sci-fi, contemporary
Pagecount: 352 pages A maverick virologist desperately hunts for a cure to a zombie pandemic that claimed thousands of lives. Not just for the greater good of humanity, but for her husband - a transformed zombie, she keeps chained to the radiator in her basement, hoping for her cure to arrive in time...
In the wake of a viral pandemic that leaves its victims reduced to half-living-creatures without any control of their mental faculties, we follow virologist Kesta Shelley working on the frontline in the desperate scramble for a cure. To her, this race against the clock isn't just a scientific-, but a personal one too. As she works overtime at the laboratory, no-one is aware of the secret she’s harboring back home. Chained to her radiator, hidden from governmental agencies and the CDC, is her husband - one of the last surviving infected - barely clinging to life.
In her desperation to keep her undead husband "alive", Kesta twists every rule of medical ethics she's been taught, for better or worse.
Genre: horror, magical realism
Pagecount: 336 pages
A grieving mother grows a little monster out of a piece of her deceased childs lung.
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
Genre: literary horror
Pagecount: 240 pages
Protagonist sees her wife transform into a hybrid sea-creature in the wake of a traumatic event at the ocean floor.
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home.
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.
Genre: magical realism, indigenous fiction
Pagecount: 323 pages
A man grieving the loss of his brother arrives in a strange town, isolated in the US desert. Its inhabitants (and he himself eventually) are changed in almost animalistic ways by their personal grief and pasts.
When his brother Kai went into the river that faithful day, he didn’t so much die as vanish from Damiens life. With this loss heavy in his bones, Damien feels an outcast in his old life and decides to walk away from it all. After a long walk (note the significance) through the desert, he finds himself in a remote fishing village, hoping to escape his grief. He soon discovers his journey has only brought him deeper into the land of the grieving…
As he’s taken in by a family of Pescadores, he soon discovers that each of the villages inhabitants carries their own grief, and is slowly being transformed by it. The more he learns about the loss this village has recently suffered, the more he is ensnared in a net of familial bonds and trauma, that threaten to drag him into the very depths that claimed his brother.
Genre: Young Adult magical realism, contemporary
Pagecount: 368 pages
Teenage protagonist believes her mother turned into a zombie, right before she passed away.
Sixteen-year-old Zharie Young is absolutely certain her mother morphed into a zombie before her untimely death, but she can't seem to figure out why. Why her mother died, why her aunt doesn't want her around, why all her dreams seem suddenly, hopelessly out of reach. And why, ever since that day, she's been seeing zombies everywhere.
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