AJW has one button to press with this book and to be fair it’s a good button and he’s really good at pressing it. This book delves deep in to the body horror, it’s fleshy and skin crawly and invasive, but it doesn’t feel too exaggerated. I think pregnancy horror excels when the horror is pregnancy. There is no need to over-exaggerate symptoms when the symptoms are naturally pretty fucked up. All the horror is in Crane’s personal relationship to his body, and of being in a vulnerable condition while in a high control group. It does an amazing job of keeping you in Crane’s headspace, it doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable details, and isn’t afraid to let him be an imperfect, complicated protagonist.

I did think it lacked a bit in exploring… anything else? The cult aspects were vague, the alien horror didn’t really go anywhere and felt more like set dressing than an integral part of the story. In some ways I think that really worked, but I think we just needed a touch more meat on those bones. Also suffered a bit from indulging in how fucked up it was by telling you how fucked up it was. However, most books that do this are compensating for a lack of real horror with any substance, and at least YWMTBH puts its money where its mouth is in that regard.

Flyaway excels at atmosphere, it spends a lot of time developing a world that feels extremely grounded and material even with such a poetic and fairytale style of prose. This is a setting that is pretty familiar to me, I live in the same city as Jennings and I’ve spent a lot of time in rural Queensland towns growing up, so I don’t know how well this feeling comes across to non-Australians, but it felt very eerie to me, like I was in a place that was familiar but just slightly out of step of reality. Everything was wrong in a subtle, under the surface way and it was delicious.

If I have one complaint, I think the book would have been served well by being a bit longer. It introduces a lot of really cool ideas, but we don’t sit with any of them long enough to feel really satisfied with what they mean in the story, a lot was left vague. (Some meta knowledge I have of the author, since I go to a lot of her writing workshops, she has a whole process for what to do to make a book shorter or longer, so there’s a chance that the length and the vagueness was entirely intentional, to better serve the fairytale theming. It was just something I personally didn’t vibe with. It’s not a total deal-breaker, but with how short the book was I think I just wanted something more to chew on.)

McCurdy does an excellent job of capturing Waldo's mindset and emotional state. The themes and content were bleak, but she has a good sense for wit, balancing the humour just enough to cut the heaviness without devaluing it. While I was reading it it felt impossible to put down, it stuck in my head and compelled me to keep reading. Which might actually be a bad thing, because it did put me in a very mild and very brief depressive state lmao.

It’s been a while since I read it now, and I don’t think it’s sticking with me as much as her first book did, but she has definitely found her niche in fiction writing and I’ll be checking out whatever her next book is.