 “I started to see demons’ faces in the drugstore aisles. An older woman with a walker stared at me, and her face was distorted. One eye was bulging out of her face, the eye socket was open, no eyelid, and her nose was long and hooked. What was happening?” As the title reveals, this book is not a horror novel—it is a memoir. But bear with me here. Inferno, a nod to Dante’s classic journey through hell, is the story of a new mother’s nightmarish journey as she is pushed beyond her mental limits, resulting in postpartum psychosis (a condition I was completely ignorant of until I read Cho’s book). While on maternity leave and traveling with her husband and new baby to meet family, Cho’s perceptions of reality begin to break down. She experiences auditory and visual hallucinations, sees demon eyes in her own baby’s face, and believes that she is literally in hell being put through a test or ordeal. The reader is on the journey with Cho, experiencing her involuntary admission into a psychiatric ward and the disturbing sensory details of her psychosis from someone who has walked those halls of hell and survived to remember them with lucidity. These accounts are not only deeply disturbing, but also supremely personal; the manifestations of Cho’s psychosis are born out of her most deep-seated fears, reflecting the advice and stories her Korean grandmother told her as a child, the trauma from her past relationships, and the neuroses of her family members. The poetic vignettes of childhood memories visiting her grandparents in Korea and snippets of happy moments with her husband round out the narrative and leave you rooting for Cho like a heroine in a novel—and constantly having to remind yourself THIS WAS ALL REAL. “The voice was in my head again. ‘Your son has to die, and it has to be your husband’s fault.’” Most parents can attest to the mind-numbing sleep deprivation of those first weeks with a baby, can remember the distressing sense of losing control over one’s life, even one’s body. For me, horror is at its most visceral when it is just on the edge of my own experiences, when I’m not only fearing for the protagonist of the story but also realizing this could happen to me. So even though Inferno is not a horror novel, it made me feel the permeability of the veil between sane and insane, and the uncanny plausibility of slipping into a never-ending karmic loop based not just on my own actions, but on the actions of my ancestors going back for generations. The realization that madness is ultimately personal, that the manifestations aren’t the random images of a misfiring brain, made me re-examine what I fear most in this world, and how those fears would haunt me someday should my own mind succumb to psychosis. Although I highly recommend this memoir to those who love psychological horror, do not pick up this book when you are feeling psychologically or emotionally vulnerable. It hits too close to home. The real horror of Inferno is not in the haunting and poetic descriptions of an unwell mind that can no longer perceive the difference between reality and nightmare, but in the dawning realization that there, but for the grace of God, go I. Review by Amber Logan INFERNO: A MEMOIR OF MOTHERHOOD AND MADNESS BY CATHERINE CHO  When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward. The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience – of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other.  Amber Logan is an author, freelance editor, and university instructor. She is currently a PhD Creative Writing candidate with Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England (although she lives in Kansas). Amber is an otaku about everything Japanese, and loves writing weird, dark, slipstreamy retellings—usually set in Japan.   Comments are closed.
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