Desirée de Fez’s Don’t Leave Her Alone Turns Motherhood Into Body Horror

Desirée de Fez’s Don’t Leave Her Alone makes the routines of motherhood feel strange before anything supernatural happens. Two sisters, Alba and Diana, are raising children with help from their mother, Carmen. Their family life is close-knit and practical, but that closeness has begun to carry a cost: the women’s anxieties about their children feed into one another, and Diana’s husband sees the three as enabling each other’s fears.

De Fez, an expert horror film critic, draws on her own story for the first time in this novel, translated from Spanish by Lizzie Davis. In her author’s note, she names David Cronenberg and her mother as muses. That pairing points toward the book’s distinctive mix: the ordinary demands of family life sit beside the unsettling physical transformations of body horror. The result is less a rush of shocks than a quietly building disturbance, rooted in the intimate bonds between the women.

When family closeness becomes confinement

Alba’s unease is visible in the way she moves through her days. She won’t leave the children at home without her, and takes them and Carmen along to urgent care centers, school pickups and the mall. She has given up pursuing her degree to stay home with the children; now, preparations for the approaching holiday celebrations have become another focus for her anxious energy. Diana has compulsions of her own, though she sees her sister’s behavior as more consuming.

The novel’s title echoes Diana’s observation that Alba can’t be left alone. At first, that idea lands as a description of routine and dependency. As the story shifts, it grows more unsettling. On Christmas Eve, Alba finds herself alone and stranded in a mall. Then she, Diana and Carmen each discover the same frightening wound: a band of blood across the stomach. The mark makes their connection feel bodily, and the story begins to slip from tense family drama into hallucination and visceral horror.

Alba sees tentacles emerge from her abdomen. The images that follow press her to reckon with fear and nostalgia, including memories of a campground that represents the most independent summer of her life. Her past offers a glimpse of who she was when her identity wasn’t so tightly bound to caring for other people. That tension gives the novel’s grotesque imagery an emotional purpose: the horror takes shape around a woman who has spent so much of herself on others that she must ask what remains for her.

The body keeps its own account

De Fez lets the novel’s shift in register do much of its work. The early pages lean on conversation and racing thoughts. Against that grounded, restless texture, the turn toward body horror and visions feels abrupt in a way that gives it force. The surrealism doesn’t arrive as a tidy explanation for the characters’ behavior. It makes their anxieties harder to ignore and leaves readers room to sit with questions the book doesn’t resolve.

One of those questions concerns where a mother ends and her family begins. Diana often sees Alba and her family as a single unit, almost one body rather than a group of separate people. In Alba’s waking nightmares, other family groups appear linked together, moving through their duties as if they were following an automatic script. The image makes visible the pattern the sisters have been living: everyone connected, everyone responsible, and little space for an individual self.

The tentacles extend that idea in a more disturbing direction. Alba’s body reaches outward, seeking someone to give to. But the image also speaks to the exhaustion of giving without relief—of sacrificing energy and attention for other people’s happiness until the habit starts to feel like an identity. The novel’s horror, then, isn’t simply the sight of an impossible wound. It’s the recognition that care can become so all-consuming that the person providing it struggles to recognize herself.

A tense, unresolved reckoning

De Fez’s portrayal of motherhood has a lively, sometimes comic disorder. The book takes aim at certain husband-fathers and considers how women depend on one another in ways that can be sustaining as well as harmful. Alba, Diana and Carmen share a thick web of care, but the same closeness can let them reinforce each other’s anxieties. Their difficulty speaking openly about their relationships and inner lives leaves those tensions to surface in stranger forms.

That’s where the book’s domestic detail and its hallucinations meet. A trip to the mall, a school pickup or the work of preparing for a holiday can sit alongside a vision that makes family life feel uncanny. The novel suggests that distraction and routine may keep difficult thoughts at bay for a while, but they don’t settle what a person has avoided asking herself. Alba’s journey becomes a kind of exorcism as well as a reckoning: she has to confront the conflict within her before she can imagine something different on the other side.

Readers looking for a neatly explained supernatural mystery may find the loose ends frustrating. De Fez leaves some questions open and withholds clear answers. For readers drawn to surreal fiction that trusts its images to linger, that restraint is part of the appeal. Fans of Mariana Enriquez may appreciate the novel’s unsettling blend of the familiar and the strange; those who respond to the slow, fraught conversations in Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream may also recognize its way of making family unease feel claustrophobic.

Don’t Leave Her Alone works as campy horror and as an unsparing inquiry into what motherhood can demand of a person. Its bloody images give physical form to a quieter question: who is Alba when she isn’t defined by what she gives? De Fez offers no simple answer, but the book’s final impression is clear enough: the first step toward reclaiming a self may be to face the thoughts that have had no room to speak.

FICTION
Don’t Leave Her Alone
By Desirée de Fez, Translated by Lizzie Davis
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Published on October 13, 2026

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