Review of Comfort Me with Apples

Catheryn Valente is known for drawing on fairy tales and retelling classic stories, such as in her Russian folklore-inspired novel Deathless. But her latest book takes quite a different approach, obscuring exactly which story it is retelling until the very end. Comfort Me with Apples, which came out just last week, is a bite-size horror novella that packs quite a punch for its small size.

Sophia is living a perfect life with the perfect husband in their perfect little suburban community known as Arcadia Gardens. She wakes up every morning thinking about how much she loves her husband and the house he built her, with its extravagantly large bed and furniture. She never even dreams of going into the locked basement that her husband has explicitly forbidden her from entering. But Sophia’s blissful ignorance is shattered one morning when she opens a drawer in her vanity to reveal an unfamiliar hairbrush and a lock of another woman’s hair. How did someone else’s hair get inside her house? Inside her vanity? And whose hair could it possibly be? Sophia runs her errands and makes house calls with her neighbors, but all the while she can’t help wondering about the lock of hair…. As the chapters are interspersed with increasingly sinister excerpts from the agreement between residents and the Arcadia Gardens Home Owners Association, it quickly becomes clear that there is some serious trouble in this paradise.

Cat Valente’s writing always has an ethereal, fairy-tale quality to it that is well-suited to plots that borrow quite heavily from folklore. I can’t really discuss the main story at the heart of this retelling without spoiling it (although, if you’re cleverer than I am, you may pick up on it much sooner than I did). But blended with this central story are folkloric elements reminiscent of one of the most disturbing fairy tales, in my opinion: Bluebeard. The French folktale “Bluebeard” has many variations, but the core story is that of a young woman who marries a wealthy and powerful widower. When she moves into his luxurious home, her husband forbids her from entering one locked room. Unable to resist her curiosity, however, the wife opens this locked door and behind it discovers the corpses of her husband’s former wives. I consider this story to be a Proto-Gothic fairy tale, since its plot elements have been incorporated into countless Gothic novels. In fact, you could consider many manifestations of the First Wife trope to be variations on this story. Thus, the minute Comfort Me with Apples mentioned a locked door in this otherwise perfect home, I had an inkling of what might be behind it. 

But the creepy setting of Comfort Me with Apples is not limited to just the interior of the house in which Sophia and her husband live. This novel takes the most idealized of American settings—suburbia, of the proverbial white picket fence—and twists it into something far more sinister. The suspenseful atmosphere of the novel is built up through snippets from the gated community’s HOA contract, which lays out the list of rules that residents must follow. At first these seem innocuous, like what colors of paint one is allowed to paint one’s house with. But more alarming rules are slipped in between the kinds of things we might expect. This is definitely the kind of situation where you’ll want to read the fine print!

If you’d like to read Comfort Me with Apples for yourself, you can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or order it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know what you think in the comments (though do try to avoid spoilers for those who haven’t yet)!