Desirée de Fez has spent much of her career examining what makes horror tick. A film journalist and critic specialising in the fantastic and the macabre, she brings that knowledge to Don’t Leave Her Alone, her new novel, which finds body horror in the anxieties, obligations and unspoken resentments of family life.
Published today, Tuesday October 13, the book blends grotesque physical transformation with a darkly comic portrait of motherhood and the things we carry inside us:
Alba has spent her life avoiding being alone, relying on the presence of others to keep her anxieties at bay. But when she wakes up on the floor of a shopping centre, covered in blood and with little memory of what happened, the life she has built around that fear begins to unravel. Meanwhile, her sister Diana struggles to reconcile work with motherhood, while their mother, Carmen, remains caught in an exhausting cycle of sacrifice and duty. As Christmas Eve approaches, the tensions binding three generations of women take on a disturbingly physical form.
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To celebrate today’s release of the book, CinemaChords spoke to de Fez about turning familiar family pressures into visceral horror, finding humour in bodily grotesquerie, and the anxieties that can grow unchecked when we refuse to confront them.
