Friday, February 16, 2018

Women in Horror: Baby Teeth by Koje Stage


Baby Teeth is a look into the dysfunctional family that includes Suzette, Alex, and Hanna. Suzette is a stay at home mother who is overwhelmed and at her wit's end. She spends every waking moment with her daughter Hanna, who at 6 years old has not said a word and seems to take pleasure in doing the opposite of anything she asks. Schools won't keep Hanna since she is usually kicked out for behavior issues within weeks, so Suzette schools her at home. When her husband Alex comes home, Suzette is expected to have dinner ready on the table and a cheery demeanor. She is determined to be a better mother than her own, who was abusive and neglectful, and is obsessed with appearing to be the perfect mom. Her other main concern is her health as her Crohn's disease was left undiagnosed for years, leading to invasive surgeries, festering wounds, fistulas, and ugly scars. It only fed more and more into her obsession with cleanliness and the appearance of perfection that is leading to the loss of her sense of self.

Even with all of her legitimate issues, it's hard for me to sympathize with Suzette. First, the whole experience of being pregnant was torturous due to her Crohn's disease. It's clear that part of her frustration towards Hanna is resentment for that experience when she had to go without her medication for the sake of her baby. I know she probably through aborting and adopting was giving up and not what a perfect mom would do, but it's a valid question. Second, she gives Hanna anything she wants to placate her, rendering any sort of lecture useless. Hanna only learns that she can get away with anything, especially when she plays her mother and father against each other. Third, Suzette has treated Hanna as an equal rival in a war, competing for Alex's attention and affection as if she were another child. It's a weird dynamic that gives Hanna too much power and makes Suzette a terrible parent. Lastly, no wonder Hanna hates her. As a three year old, Hanna was misbehaving and throwing chewed up food. Suzette's response was to stuff it all in Hanna's mouth and force her to swallow it to the point of choking. This made Suzette more monstrous than her child and so hard to feel sorry for.

Alex, Suzette's husband, is oblivious in all of this and has his own issues. Whenever Suzette or anyone else comes to him with stories of Hanna's awful behavior, he dismisses it as others not being able to handle Hanna's spirited behavior. He sees intelligence and playfulness where Suzette sees conniving and sinister. It gets to the point where Suzette will keep quiet about Hanna's bad behavior to keep the peace, so it's allowed to get much worse. He spends his days working at his office and leaving all of the child rearing to Suzette. Whenever she calls for help, he makes excuse after excuse to not interrupt his day. His job isn't easy, but dumping all of Hanna's care on Suzette is awful and not parenting. Alex loves that Hanna favors him and treats him like she doesn't treat her mother. Father and daughter isolate themselves from Suzette when together and treat her like an outsider and an annoyance. Alex gave Hanna the pieces to make an under the bed friend from one of her books that Suzette threw away as a voodoo doll at best and trash at worst. Hanna was crushed, but how was Suzette supposed to know it had any significance when they literally box her out. Alex is happy to stay oblivious and also feeds into the practice that not acknowledging problems means they don't exist. 

This brings us to Hanna herself. The novel alternates between Suzette and Hanna's point of view, so we hear her voice despite her mute nature. Hanna doesn't want to go to school and finds other people in general useless. Her intelligence shows itself in chilling ways as she calculates how to get kicked out of schools or how to make her mother look bad. She hates her mother and wants to expose Suzette's bad behavior to Alex so he will reject her and only spend time with Hanna. This goes as expected in a horror novel as Hanna eventually settles on killing Suzette. On one hand, I feel for Hanna because her parents are obviously not the greatest. They succeeded in trying to one up each other that Hanna adapted to their battle and became better at it. She obviously has sociopathic tendencies where people don't mean much to her outside of Alex. Her curiosity leads to some disturbing scenes and her imagination crosses the line into possible psychosis. She adopts the personality of a teen burned as witch in history to speak threats to her mother and brings her imaginary friends to life who tell her that getting rid of her mom is a great idea.  

Baby Teeth captured my attention and held it like a trainwreck. I wanted to see how far Hanna would go to achieve her goal and how horrible her parents could be. This has been compared to Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. That story worked as a nature veruses nurture study with no definitive answer and because the mother Eva is a sympathetic character despite her mistakes. Suzette is no Eva and makes so many moronic mistakes before the book is over. It also seems pretty clear why Hanna is the way she is. I felt that for a thriller or horror book, it didn't go as far as I would have liked. There are some disturbing scenes, but family drama takes up most of the novel. The ending seems clearly open for a sequel, which I would read out of curiousity, but Stage wants to leave it up to the imagination.  

My rating: 3/5 fishmuffins

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