Women in Horror Month: A Review of “The Rust Maidens” by Gwendolyn Kiste
The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste
You get a different experience when listening to a book versus reading it, and often I find myself wanting to do both – listen to an audio version after reading or read it after an audio version. This is definitely one of the later, and I can see myself picking up in print form later down the line.
After almost three decades away from her hometown, Phoebe returns home, where she confronts the past she left behind, including the girls she grew up with and her best friend, Jacqueline. After graduating high school, Phoebe looked forward to the future, but something strange happened during that summer, when the girls she’s known her whole life change right before her eyes.
There’s a lot to this book, as the girls transform and Phoebe tries – in both the present and past – to understand what happened. As news of the strange events spread, tourists, doctors and government men arrive, but the girls stick together and don’t let anyone – not even Phoebe – in on their secrets.
Kiste does an excellent job of transporting the reader to this crumbling, decaying city, and capturing the sense of hopelessness that settles over the residents. The Rest Maidens’ transformation is set against a backdrop of adults who don’t understand them and ignore the teen girls in favour of their own problems, restricting them, trying to control them, and forcing them into boxes. It’s that teenage girl element that really makes this stand out, with one girl punished when she falls pregnant, while the father is allowed to just carry on doing what he’s always done as just one example of how the town – men and women alike – try to control them, with the worst behaviour coming from their own mothers.
As the girls change, the adults realise the lack of control they have over them. They are transforming into something unrecognisable, even as Phoebe transforms into womanhood. The parents grow angry, directing their blame wherever they can as long as it is not at their own feet, refusing to acknowledge the ways in which they have tried to stifle their children. And in their attempts to ‘protect’ them, they do the opposite, leaving it up to only a handful to actually try and follow the wishes of the Rust Maidens.
It's hard not to see a reflection of society’s own treatment of teenage girls, and to feel a sense of satisfaction when they transcend what society wants of them. It’s also crucial that they’re teenagers in the 80s, a point when these girls would have had completely different lives than what their own mothers would remember from their own teen years, and Kiste shows this disconnect and friction between the generations really well. It’s effective, and it’s powerful, and it leaves the reader with imagery they won’t soon forget.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt
I purchased this book using an Audible credit.
