Novella — Complete

When Penny Woods answers a call from her Aunt Dolores, she knows she’s not in for a pleasant chat. Even helicopter-parent style fussing would be better, actually, than what Penny gets when her aunt reaches out: clingy neediness at best and another inconvenient favor to be guilted into at worst.

So when her aunt asks Penny to pick a few things up from her apartment—the apartment where Penny, her sister, and their mother lived with Aunt Dolores during her mother’s final years suffering from a terminal illness—Penny isn’t surprised. She is surprised to discover during this errand that her aunt has cleared out the storage unit in the apartment building’s basement, giving away all of Penny’s mother’s belongings and leaving in their place a series of paintings, one of which catches Penny’s eye.

A woman floating before a void, her body riddled with holes.

Penny loses time staring at it, and can’t get it out of her head when she finally leaves the storage unit behind. Especially when she wakes up with a similar hole boring through her own body. Now, as always with Aunt D, one favor leads to another and another, and every morning Penny wakes with more and more holes running through her flesh. As her body weakens and her emotional well-being collapses, Penny must discover a way to stop these holes from overtaking her.

If you liked Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman but wished it was actually a horror novel, if you loved the themes of toxic families and generational trauma in the 2018 film Hereditary, and if you want to read the written-word equivalent of a Junji Ito manga’s imagery, you’ll love NOTHING TENDER.