Comfort Me With Apples

by Catherynne M. Valente

Overview

Comfort Me With Apples is a terrifying new thriller from bestseller Catherynne M. Valente, for fans of Gone Girl and Spinning Silver

A Shirley Jackson Award finalist!
A Locus Award finalist!

Sophia was made for him. Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect.

It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze....

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250816207
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/09/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	96,364
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as the Prix Imaginales. Valente has also been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

Find out more on her website and on Twitter!

Editorial Reviews

10/25/2021

This gem of a novella from Valente (The Past Is Red) packs a lot of intrigue into a brief page count. Sophia lives in the upscale gated community of Arcadia Gardens, a supposed utopian oasis under the management of the Arcadia Gardens Homeowners Association. The rules in Arcadia are strange and specific, forbidding, among other things, dancing and the building of structures for beekeeping, but all are said to be in favor of purity and harmony. Sophia’s life is basically a fairy tale, complete with a beloved husband at her side. But even as the reader takes in the frothy, enchanted atmosphere, there are hints that Sophia is teetering in an illusion that will soon launch her into darkness. This turns out to be the case when Sophia discovers a mysterious silver hairbrush and a dark tangle of hair in a locked drawer of their home and her fairy tale perception begins to dissolve. A masterful late reveal proves this to be a clever reworking of a famous story, reframing all that came before. Though there are some moments of excessive exposition, Valente packs in enough charm, curiosity, and foreboding to make this worthwhile. Fans will be delighted. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

A Shirley Jackson Award finalist!
A Locus Award finalist!

Praise for Comfort Me With Apples:

“Valente modernizes the old-fashioned “what’s up with my husband” question that many heroines in dusty castles pondered [and] brings to mind Ira Levin’s classic The Stepford Wives” —The Washington Post, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“No one can move from sweet whimsy to bone-deep dread with the deftness of Catherynne M. Valente. Comfort Me With Apples is a darkly elegant fairytale-horror story that will haunt you in the best ways. Move it to the top of your TBR.” —Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author

“A lush and furious fairytale. Valente always delivers.” —Laurie Penny, screenwriter for The Haunting of Bly Manor and author of Everything Belongs to the Future

“I just about melted into the story, and someone will have to comb through Valente's exquisite prose to fish out my skeleton because I was wholly lost in the tale. It was so clever, so nefarious, so, well, Valente. To me, she's Angela Carter with knives for teeth.” —Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author

“Comfort Me With Apples is a furious and tantalizingly crooked domestic mystery, as slim and sharp as a needle.” —Melissa Albert, bestselling author of The Hazel Wood

“Valente's prose is crystalline as always: airy, beautiful, perfect as Sophia herself. But under all that beauty, there is an open wound bleeding so much rage. Comfort Me With Apples is the first book in a long time that has managed to surprise me: an experience both cathartic and unforgettable.” —Cassandra Khaw, award-winning author

From the Publisher