#Titanuary ‘Such A Pretty Smile’ by Kristi DeMeester

About the book…
A biting novel from an electrifying new voice,‘Such A Pretty Smile’ is a heart-stopping tour-de-force about powerful women, angry men, and all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to silence them.
There’s something out there that’s killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.

2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother—the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice—until she is punished for using it.

2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape—both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waves her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.

As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty

A revisionist and feminist fable which will resonate with all those told ‘you would be pretty if you smiled more’, this novel deals with women(and young girls) who refuse to smile and challenge other people’s (men and peers) who are uncomfortable with that brutal honesty.

The main character you first encounter, Lila, straddles adolescence uneasily, her best friend, Macie, she suspects of keeping her around to make her look better.
Her burgeoning sexuality makes her feel attracted to Macie in a way which is inexplicable given the way society drives girls into the arms of men and boys, and the way her internal dialogue os exposed is so brutally raw and honest it is occasionally painful to read.

Lila’s mother barely sees her, her art is all consuming g and yet she lays these laws down to supposedly keep her safe without giving Lila the full facts in order to make a good decision-such as being too young to shave her legs, or go out on her own, and the presence of the Cur, a serial killer taking ‘wayward’ young women is a convenient boogeyman to reinforce the notion of how a patriarchal society expects girls to behave.

What Caroline is not telling Lila is her own experiences with mental health have left her labelled difficult, temperamental and drove her husband,Lila’s father, away.

His new family are all consuming so with him being absent apart from token phone calls,and her mother having her art,Lila is increasingly falling,Alice like, down the rabbit hole of her reality.
She wants and needs to know more about what is going on and why theCur, and men in general box women in with their expectations and wait to draw blood.
Lila wants to be the one to draw blood and her increasingly precarious grasp on who and what she is occasionally breaks and the truth comes out, hard, fast and dirty.

She hurts those around her and worries that she will be seen as her mother’s daughter,inhabiting a hinterland of wicked and subverted thoughts.

When she explodes at Macie who uses her once too many times,this scene is redolent with violence and nastiness that let’s rip unapologetically. It happens again with her mother before flipping back to Caroline’s story, 15 years before the events of Lila’s teen years.

The line between beautiful and beauty has rarely been so explicitly and beautifully rendered,I absolutely could not get enough of Kristi’s prose and the dark, subversive nature of her storytelling.
This is for every girl who feels the push and pull of societal expectations versus a primal need to stand up and be seen as your own person worthy of opportunity respect and love.

About the author…
Kristi DeMeester is the author of ‘‘Beneath’‘, published by Word Horde, and ‘Everything That’s Underneath’ by Apex Books.
Her short fiction has been included in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror Volumes 9 and 11, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volumes 1, 3, and 5, and Stephen Jone’s Best New Horror.
Her short fiction has also appeared in publications such as Black Static, The Dark, Pseudopod, as well as several others. In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first.