Rachel Harrison is gleefully making a name for herself as a feminist horror author to watch, moving around archetypes with dizzying precision and notable glee, having penned novels focusing on werewolves (Such Sharp Teeth), witches (Cackle), and now religious fundamentalism in Black Sheep.
Black Sheep focuses on Vesper. Vesper hasn’t seen her family in a number of years, fleeing her religiously-strict family unit to work a menial, soul-crushing restaurant job and is just trudging towards decades more misery. A mysterious invitation entices her back to her homestead in time for a wedding and it’s then that Vesper’s true identity – and her dark destiny – comes to fruition.
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Harrison is certainly no slump when it comes to crafting complex female leads – look at Cackle, for example, with its focus on two adrift, broken people finding a family in one another – and Vesper is no exception. At times infuriating and relatable, messy and guarded, and eminently likeable throughout, Vesper is caught within the complex webs of her uncomfortable childhood – an absent father, a cold mother, and siblings who treated her more as something to be placed on a pedestal, rather than an actual human being – and, as the saying goes, only by going back, to her religious compound of a home, can she begin to move forward.
Her story forms the narrative crux of Black Sheep, and while it is ostensibly a horror novel – there’s enough graphic imagery and faith-aligned gore for the masses, along with the meta-textual chewiness of Constance, Vesper’s distant, disdainful mother, having garnered her success as a horror movie maven – it’s also more about the themes within. Readers expecting a bloodfest will be left wanting, as Harrison centres the somewhat simplistic story and its twists and turns on Vesper learning about her past with a narcissistic parent and her destiny, rather than scares, thrills. or kills, although the book’s final act helps provide some much-needed stakes to the story.
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While the actual story itself is not the most complex ever put to paper, Harrison imbues Black Sheep with some great characterisation and exploration of key themes that make it an overall satisfying and emotive story, one about embracing your past and allowing yourself not to be defined by it. By the time the pages finish turning, past a slightly unnecessarily epilogue, it’ll be a hard reader not to find something of themselves in Vesper’s story and be rooting for her every step of the way.
Black Sheep is out now from Titan Books.
