Horror ABCs: Incidents Around the House (Copy)
Written by Emmapanada: 5/26/2025
Hello and welcome back to the horror novel review series, Horror ABCs! It’s been quite a while since my last review, so here’s a quick refresher. Typically in this series I go to the horror section of the various bookstores near me and, using a random number generator, find a horror novel to read and review! However, in this case, I received this book as a birthday present from my brother, Dan. It left me with a lot of thoughts, and I thought reviving this series would be a great way to talk about them!
Today’s entry is Grace Byron’s debut novel from 2025, Herculine. From the Goodreads synopsis:
“Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story — conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes — but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.
The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own.
While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.”
My brother got this book for me as a birthday gift because he had heard the author, Grace Byron, talking about it in an interview and thought it sounded right up my alley. In so many ways, it is! Trans shit? Religious trauma? That’s so me, for real for real. I was so excited when he told me about it because I was ready to get all up in my feelings from reading it. Unfortunately, it never quite hit me in the ways that I was hoping for. I think this was largely a problem with expectations. While I was disappointed by the book in a number of ways when I first put it down, as I’ve thought about it more and more I’ve grown to appreciate it for what it is and what I believe Grace intended it to be.
The expression and journey of each individual member of the trans community can be so radically different from one another, but each of those expressions and journeys is still important, valuable, and valid. That said, a lot of the transgender characters in this book are extremely sex focused in a way that I found it hard to relate to them on a personal level, as I’m asexual. Additionally, the characters in the book are very into recreational drug use, which is something I support but don’t partake in. So while I was initially very excited to connect with this book in a personal way, I quickly realized that the trans women in this story are very unlike me and I should adjust my expectations for how much this book would strike me. However, something that does connect me with the narrator is religious trauma, so I was eager to see the book explore those elements every time they reared their head. Even though it took about 60-70% of the way into the story for the religious elements of the story to be fully revealed and explored, once that happened I couldn’t put it down.
Sadly, while the base concept of the religious “twist” excited and interested me, it was never explored in a way that satisfied me. The dilemmas that many of the side characters were going through ended up being much more interesting to me than what the main character was going through. I was excited to see how she would interact with them or how those dilemmas would be explored, only for them to be barely touched on. By the time I finished Herculine, I found myself a bit confused and frustrated that so much potential had been thrown away by the author.
A lot of reviews I’ve seen on Goodreads (which typically isn’t a great place to look at reviews, but I digress) seemed to have a lot of the same criticisms of this book as I did. The themes weren’t explored fully or in a satisfying way, the interesting parts of the book were merely touched on and then disregarded. Additionally, the ways that trans women are portrayed as jealous, catty, sex and drug obsessed, and trauma filled doesn’t feel great for the overall image of trans women at a time where we’re under attack constantly. I feel like these criticisms are valid, to a degree, but then I read Grace’s acknowledgements section at the back of her book.
Her acknowledgements took me out of my own head and reminded me that this book was written by a human who was very passionate about what she was writing. I remembered my friends who have written and how personal the first stories they wrote were, and I began thinking about Herculine through that lens. I told myself to stop criticizing the book based on my own expectations of what I hoped it would be, and start looking at it for what it was and what Grace was interested in having it explore.
Once I did that I understood this book much more deeply. This wasn’t something looking to deeply look at gender and the questions a trans person faces when confronted with impossible scenarios that would give us everything we wanted at a cost. It was a book that wanted to explore the scars that are left by conversion therapy, the harms of relationships and communities built on trauma bonding, and sex. Probably, at least. As mentioned, I couldn’t really connect with the sex part but there was a lot of it.
The demons in this book are real, but they’re also deeply representative of the trauma trans people carry. Whether that trauma has been given to us by ourselves from living so deeply closeted for so long, by our parents by trying to fix us when we try to show ourselves, or by our friends and how they use and discard us. Queer people often trauma bond with one another in really unhealthy ways, and centrally this book seems to want to explore that and talk about how unhealthy and dangerous it is.
There are a number of things that I wish had been done better in Herculine. It’s by no means perfect. There are times where the conflict reaches an apex only for it to be ended abruptly, finding ourselves in another scene without resolution. I also wish that the twist had been foreshadowed better, and that the sex and drugs were dialed back in order to better explore the other characters. Despite that, Herculine is a deeply personal story written by someone who these words clearly carry a lot of weight with. The story makes mistakes that I feel are easily forgivable for a debut novel, and I hope Grace learns from them and continues writing whatever she wants. She’s got a good mind, and I’m interested to see what she brings us next.
3 stars.
The Emmapanada Rating Scale:
5 Stars means that I thought this book was excellent, and it had a profound emotional impact on me.
4 Stars means that this was a really, really good book. The characters and narrative were well established and explored, and I had an amazing time reading it.
3 Stars means that this was a solid book. I had my problems with it, but overall I would still recommend it to certain people and I think it’s worthwhile.
2 Stars means I was disappointed by the book for a number of reasons. However, there were still one or two things about the book that I enjoyed and I can understand that even though I didn’t enjoy it fully, I could see others liking it.
1 Star means that I really just did not connect with this book in any way.