Some novels just tear you apart. They get into your veins, into your soul, into your mind and wreck you. Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin is a book like that. Told in chapters that alternate about a decade apart, Kerin’s story focuses on Mia and her mother Izzy as they try to manage Izzy’s strange affliction, which turns out to be a disease afflicting much of the world. While the novel isn’t quite post-apocalyptic, it feels like it is on the brink of an apocalypse thanks to the disease that has kept people off the streets at night because the infected people known as “Saras” have a painful aversion to sunlight and hunger/need for human blood. Or, a more familiar word: vampires.
Moms can really suck.
“I’m always careful not to disturb mom. A rude awakening can definitely set her off, especially if she wakes up hungry. I can’t forget what she is. What she could do to me.”
Having a mom like Izzy meant Mia had to grow up fast. No extracurricular activities, no inviting friends over, and definitely no dating. The most important rule: tell no one of Izzy’s hunger – the one only blood can satisfy.
But Mia is tired of being her mother’s keeper. She’s in her twenties now and secretly longs for a life of her own. One where she doesn’t have to worry about anyone discovering their terrible secret, or breathing down her neck. When Mia meets rebellious musician Jade she dares to hope she’s found a way to leave her home – and her mom – behind.
It just might be Mia’s only chance of getting out alive.
While the world at large has adjusted to the new status quo (in as much as is possible when living in a pandemic, something about which the world currently knows), Kerin focuses her story on the codependent relationship between mother and daughter, Izzy and Mia. When we first meet Mia in 2010, she is only 13 and she has to grow up very quickly and be a caregiver (and blood-giver, literally) to her mother. The “NOW” is about 10 years later with Mia and her mom having moved across the country and running a restaurant which makes living a night life easier for Izzy. There’s another, even more toxic relationship that is an even greater bone of contention between Mia and Izzy than Izzy’s status as a “Sara” that hangs like a cloud of dread in both timelines in the novel. Mia is an adult growing weary of the codependent relationship she has with her mother, she works at a bookstore and is yearning for more human contact and relationships, which she always averted because of her mother. Again, a very unhealthy way to live from a mental standpoint.
Damn, is this a potent novel. Kerin painfully depicts the co-dependent bordering on parasitic relationship dynamic in Night’s Edge. I’ve had family members who found themselves in a familial caregiver type of relationship and damage and negativity can grow over the years… even when the caregiver and caretaker love each other like family. I was at a remove from that relationship, but other members of my family with whom I was close heard a lot of that negativity. The relationship between Mia and Izzy is ratcheted up a couple of levels, after all, Izzy is literally taking her daughter’s blood as sustenance.
It is difficult not to view the plague of the Saras (short for Saratov’s Syndrome) as a metaphor for COVID-19. The cloud of distrust around those with the syndrome, the reluctance to report themselves, and the barren streets are similar as well. There’s also a resistance to the cure, where many people refused the COVID vaccine for political reasons. The Saras don’t want the cure. Why would they when they don’t age and are stronger?
I can’t recall if Kerin actually used the word “vampire” in the novel and in that regard, I found a parallel to Mike Flanagan’s masterpiece, Midnight Mass. While Night’s Edge is a bit more intimate and personal, the effect is similar. I was also reminded of another vampire (and zombie) masterpiece, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend in the way the vamprisim is more of a plague/disease and how it halts civilization.
Night’s Edge is a gripping, raw, emotional and un-put-down-able novel. I completely empathized with the protagonist Mia and found myself rooting for her as much as I have for any protagonist I’ve encountered. The novel ends powerfully, but leaves the door open for a sequel which will be publishing in about a year – First Light.
This book will easily be one of my top reads of the year, highly recommended.
Hardcover | 288 pages
June 2023 | Published by Tor Nightfire
https://www.lizkerin.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
