This book, about a milkman who watches as his community becomes more and more literally haunted around him, unflinchingly drives into how trauma and repression affect adults and how easy it is not to notice at the time the things that end up shaping us into who we are. It explores pregnancy, birth, and parenthood through a horrified male lens, which for obvious reasons isn't the one we typically see. It's also a horror novel and Fletcher very effectively manages to make the most mundane parts of life seem unbearably threatening and dark.

Witch Bottle was really good, but it was just so incredibly bleak that I don't think I can really say I enjoyed it at all. Reading it was a horrible experience. I did love the descriptions of the gorgeous natural landscape - I wonder if this was intended as a counterpoint to how utterly ugly and unnerving the human characters were.