Rachel Harrison writes horror about women in their late twenties and early thirties whose lives are not working, and the monster is usually the least of their problems.
That’s the formula, and she has been refining it since 2020. A woman with a bad job, a worse relationship and a friendship group that has quietly stopped functioning encounters something supernatural, and the supernatural thing turns out to be a considerably clearer proposition than her actual life. Becoming a werewolf simplifies matters. Becoming a vampire solves the career question.
The Rachel Harrison books get filed as horror comedy, and that undersells them. The voice is genuinely funny, sharp and modern, and the jokes are doing the same work T. Kingfisher’s do: a narrator being flippant about something she can’t look at directly. Underneath it all, the books are about female friendship, about the specific loneliness of your late twenties, and about how much of women’s self-loathing is trained into them.
The Rachel Harrison books are also short, fast and extremely readable, which is not a small thing. If you’ve bounced off literary horror, this is the shelf where the prose gets out of the way.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read Such Sharp Teeth. It’s the werewolf one, it’s her best-constructed novel, and the metaphor is doing real work.
Then Cackle if you want the strangest, or Black Sheep if you want the nastiest.
The Novels
The Rachel Harrison books all run the same play, which is a woman in her thirties whose life has quietly stopped working, and a monster that gives her permission.
Such Sharp Teeth (2022)
Rory Morris comes back to her hometown to help her twin sister through a pregnancy, hits something with her car on a dark road, gets out to check, and is bitten.
The lycanthropy is a metaphor, and Harrison is entirely unembarrassed about that. Rory has been carrying rage since a relationship years earlier that the novel discloses slowly, she has spent a decade managing it, and the transformation is what happens when the management finally stops working.
What makes it more than its premise is that she enjoys it. The first change reads as relief, the strength is a relief, and the novel stays honest about the fact that a woman being permitted to be dangerous is the fantasy underneath the horror.
The sister relationship is the emotional center, and the pregnancy runs in parallel with the transformation quite deliberately.
There’s also a romance with the therapist’s son, which readers either enjoy or find a distraction.
It’s her funniest book.
Cackle (2021)
Annie moves upstate after a ten-year relationship ends, to teach English at a small-town school, and is more or less immediately adopted by Sophie, who is beautiful, wealthy, universally adored by the town, lives in a large house, and is a witch.
The comedy is that nothing goes wrong for a very long time. Sophie is kind. The town is delighted with her. The offers are genuine. Annie’s life improves in every measurable way, and the tension is entirely about whether accepting all of it would really be so bad.
Harrison writes the specific misery of a woman in her thirties who organized her entire self around a man who left, and the humor works through recognition rather than jokes.
There are also spiders, a great many of them, described with real enthusiasm, and they’re the one thing readers should be warned about.
The ending declines to punish anybody, which is exactly why its admirers love it.
Black Sheep (2023)
Vesper Wright left the church she was raised in at eighteen and hasn’t been back, and now she gets a wedding invitation from her cousin.
The church is a Satanic cult. Not a metaphor, and not a misunderstood community, an actual one, with an actual practice, and Vesper’s family are devout.
That’s the joke, and Harrison runs it completely straight. The novel is about going home to a family whose beliefs you’ve rejected, except the beliefs happen to be literally true, and the pressure to come back is the same pressure any estranged adult child will recognize.
The reveal about Vesper’s own position in the church is guessable, and it doesn’t matter.
The consensus holds that the horror runs thinner than her other books, and that the family material is the strongest thing she has written.
It’s short, and it moves.
The Return (2020)
Julie disappears on a solo hiking trip and is declared dead. Two years later, she walks out of the woods with no memory of where she has been and no explanation, and appears physically fine.
Her three closest friends arrange a reunion weekend at a themed hotel to celebrate.
The hotel is the star of the book. It’s a gaudy converted place in the middle of nowhere, decorated with taxidermy and oddities, and Harrison uses it to keep the four women in a confined space while the reader watches Julie’s condition deteriorate.
The friendship is the actual subject. These four have grown apart, the group dynamics are twenty years old and no longer fit anybody, and everybody is performing an intimacy they no longer have.
The body horror in the last third is her most extreme anywhere.
It was her debut, and it was a Bram Stoker Award finalist for first novel.
So Thirsty (2024)
Sloane turns thirty-five, her husband is having an affair, and her best friend Naomi drags her away for a weekend at a winery.
They meet a group of very attractive people at a bar, go with them, and one of them wakes up different.
The vampirism is doing the same job the werewolf did in Such Sharp Teeth, which is to give a woman who has spent her adult life being reasonable an excuse to finally stop. Sloane organized everything around a marriage that was over years ago and never noticed.
Naomi is the reason it works. The friendship is genuinely warm and messy, and Harrison writes the specific dynamic of two women who have known each other since childhood better than she writes anything else.
The consensus lands on this being the weakest of her novels, with a rushed last act, and on the two leads being her best pair.
The Short Fiction
Bad Dolls (2022)
Four novellas, published as a collection, and it’s the best entry point to her if you want to know whether the voice works on you before committing to a novel.
“Bad Dolls” is a woman at a bachelorette party in a rented house with a doll in it.
“Reply Hazy, Try Again” involves a Magic 8-Ball that starts answering accurately.
“Goblin” is the strangest of the four and the most explicitly nasty.
“Enough for Everyone” is about a woman whose life is going well and a friend whose life is not.
The pieces are short, the register matches the novels, and the compression suits her. Several readers who find the novels slack rate the novellas higher, because the padding the longer books occasionally carry is impossible at this length.
It’s cheap, and it takes an afternoon.
Where to Start
Read Such Sharp Teeth. It’s the best-built of the Rachel Harrison books, and the metaphor and the monster fit each other exactly.
If you want something odder, read Cackle. If you want something harder, read Black Sheep.
The Return is the debut and it shows, so come to it later rather than first.
And go in expecting a fast, funny book that is considerably sadder underneath than the cover suggests, because that is consistently what she delivers.
The whole shelf is ranked on my best horror books list. The creature side of her work belongs with my monster books list.
