Desirée de Fez Turns the Anxieties of Motherhood Into Body Horror in Don’t Leave Her Alone

In Don’t Leave Her Alone, Desirée de Fez makes the ordinary pressures of motherhood feel strange enough to frighten. The novel begins with family routines and anxious thoughts, then lets those familiar strains spill into hallucination and body horror. Its central question is intimate: when caring for everyone else has become a mother’s whole identity, what happens when she is left with herself?

De Fez, an expert horror film critic, draws on her own story here for the first time. In her author’s note, she names David Cronenberg and her mother as muses. That pairing helps explain the book’s particular texture: domestic life retains its everyday details even as the body becomes the site of something uncanny. The result is less a puzzle to solve than a steadily tightening encounter with fears that have been hard to name.

A family caught in a shared anxiety

Alba and Diana are sisters raising children with help from their mother, Carmen. Each has developed ways of worrying about the children’s health and whereabouts. Diana sees Alba’s anxiety as more consuming: Alba doesn’t want to leave the children at home without her, and takes them and Carmen along on trips to urgent care centers, school pickups and the mall. She has given up pursuing her degree to become a stay-at-home mother, and the coming holiday celebrations occupy much of her attention. Diana has her own compulsions, while her husband believes the three women reinforce one another’s behavior.

That family closeness can feel like support and a trap at once. Diana sees her sister’s household merging into a single unit, with little room for its members to exist separately. The novel keeps that tension alive without reducing the women to a simple diagnosis. They depend on one another, and their dependence can help them get through the day. It can also make it harder to question shared habits or speak plainly about what each woman needs.

The story’s rupture arrives on Christmas Eve, when Alba is alone and stranded in a mall. At that point, a band of blood appears across the stomachs of Alba, Diana and Carmen, as though their connection has taken physical form. Carmen struggles; Diana frets. Alba sees tentacles emerging from her abdomen, and visions force her to confront both her fears and her nostalgia. De Fez’s shift from busy conversation and racing thoughts into grotesque images has force because the book has first established the recognizable rhythms of family life.

The self beneath the work of caring

Alba’s visions lead her back toward an earlier version of herself. She remembers a campground and the most independent summer of her life, then measures that memory against her current role. What did she value before her days became organized around other people? The question isn’t framed as a rejection of her children or family. Instead, the book looks at the cost of letting care fill every available space until a person’s own wishes become difficult to hear.

The image of the tentacles gives that exhaustion a vivid shape. They reach outward, searching for someone to give to, while Alba begins to recognize how depleted she is by the constant expectation of sacrifice. She has spent her energy on other people’s happiness; now the body horror makes that pattern impossible to ignore. In the novel’s terms, the monstrous image can be read as a reckoning with a life in which giving has become reflexive, and receiving or wanting something for oneself has faded from view.

De Fez also looks at the mental noise that can keep difficult thoughts at bay. When there is no music, conversation, phone distraction or child to chase, what might surface? Alba’s memories and anxieties give the question its sting. The novel suggests that being alone can bring distress, but it can also expose truths that constant activity has kept submerged. Its horror works through that uncertainty: the frightening experience may be a symptom of losing control, a route toward self-recognition, or both.

Surreal horror with loose ends

The book’s tone can be campy, eerie and painfully familiar in quick succession. De Fez brings chaotic, sometimes comic energy to the demands placed on mothers and women, including pointed observations about certain husband-fathers. She also attends to the harder side of closeness: the tough conversations the women avoid with one another, and the questions they might rather not ask themselves. The tension isn’t simply that the family is too close. It’s that closeness can comfort people while making honest self-examination more difficult.

Readers who enjoy surreal fiction by Mariana Enriquez may find a similar appetite here for disturbing images and questions that resist neat answers. The novel leaves some threads loose and offers little explanation for its uncanny events. That choice may frustrate readers who want every image accounted for, but it suits a story more interested in emotional recognition than in a tidy account of how the horror works. Fans of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream may also respond to the strained exchanges between people who struggle to say what they mean, and the unease that gathers in the spaces between their words.

At its heart, Don’t Leave Her Alone asks what a mother might discover when the roles and routines that define her begin to loosen. Alba’s ordeal reads as an exorcism of sorts, but the prospect beyond it remains open. De Fez’s sharpest insight is that the frightening part of motherhood may not be only the fear of harm coming to a child; it can also be the dawning awareness that a mother has become unfamiliar to herself.

FICTION
Don’t Leave Her Alone
By Desirée de Fez, Translated by Lizzie Davis
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Published on October 13, 2026