Helpmeet

Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet is a remarkable throwback. The style, the precise prose, the lush imagery, the dreadful sense of wheels turning just past the reader's sightline-I devoured it in a few delighted hours and it took me back to my teenage years, to afternoons squirreled away in the corner of my local library reading Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood and the other great elder wordsmiths I cut my horror teeth on. - Craig Davidson, Author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club An everyday tragedy spirals into a medical mystery and then into something much darker and more disquieting, executed in prose that glitters like candlelight on an open wound. I loved this intensely claustrophobic study of a complicated marriage twisting itself into something monstrous. - Premee Mohamed, Author of the Beneath the Rising Trilogy In a wholly unique spot between the New York society novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton and the best body horror of David Cronenberg lurks the strange, disturbing and ultimately transcendent novella Helpmeet. Naben Ruthnum's pitch-perfect pastiche is as all-consuming as the disease at its heart, a fever dream of a story as original, elegantly written and chilling as anything I've read in recent memory. - Pasha Malla, Author of Fugue States, and Kill the Mall Naben Ruthnum's succinctly brilliant Helpmeet finds the thin line between intimacy and body horror, and blurs it to create a unique love story that is as moving as it is disturbing. - Indrapramit Das, Author of The Devourers