Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder - Funny, Folk-Inspired Fiction on Motherhood

Nightbitch (2021) is a folk-horror inspired novel about a mother (known only as “The Mother” or “Nightbitch”) who, experiencing anger and frustration at the mundane, oppressive experience of her life as a stay at home mother, starts to turn into a dog.

Before the change, Nightbitch’s life is a constant tension between internal and external narratives of motherhood, family and happiness. She should be happy- she stays home all day, raises her child, is free from (paid) work, has a husband who earns enough and loves her, has a nice home - but the reality is one of a strangulating routine and the gradual stripping away of selfhood for Mother.

Yoder uses limited third person narrative and occasional degeneration into free indirect discourse to tell the story of how the Mother embraces Nightbitch, tapping into a violent and violently elemental version of herself that fundamentally reshapes what it means to be a mother, wife and woman.

Structurally, the text deliberately begins with narrow renderings of character - ignorant, self-centred husband, irritating child, plastic and shallow Mom characters - and as Nightbitch awakens and tunes in to her canine instincts, these characters become redeemed and fleshed out.

One interesting element of the novel was Yoder’s use of hunting, killing and eating as a central motif. Yoder complicates the traditional notion of Mother as a nurturing, life-giving force by rendering her Nightbitch-interation as a violent, bunny-consuming mother-figure. Through her primeval night-romps, the crushing inertia of domesticity is shattered and her bond with her son is improved.

The question of whether she becomes a "better" mother by the end of the novel is left to the reader. Possibly Yoder argues that ideas of Good Mother and Bad Mother are culturally manufactured ideas that oppress, deskill and alienate women - or perhaps it becomes less important to be recieved as a "Good Mother" after her transformation frees her from such labels.

In her review of the novel in the Observer, Lara Feigel wrote that “Some of the book’s vision of nature loses its charge when it’s put back into the gallery”, but I have to disagree - I felt that the development of Nightbitch’s feral rampages into her long-fantasised over return to the art world is the ultimate payoff and moves the text from Carter-esque feminist folk horror into something more ambiguous and multi-faceted, whilst maintaining the agency of the protagonist rather than making her slave to her own body.

Overall an excellent read and a strong contribution to the growing field of feminist fiction dealing with the question of motherhood.