Kate’s Review: “It Will Only Hurt For A Moment”

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Book: “It Will Only Hurt For A Moment” by Delilah S. Dawson

Publishing Info: Del Rey, October 2024

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: In this highly atmospheric thriller from the Bram Stoker Award–nominated author of The Violence, a young woman hopes to reinvent herself at an isolated artists’ colony . . . only to be drawn into its dark, twisted past.

Sarah Carpenter is starting over. She’s on the run—leaving behind her unsupportive, narcissistic ex-boyfriend and alcoholic, abusive mother—and headed for a new beginning at Tranquil Falls, a secluded artists’ colony on the grounds of a closed hotel. There, with no cell signal or internet to distract her, she hopes to rediscover her love for pottery and put the broken pieces of her life back together.

But when Sarah uncovers the body of a young woman while digging a hole for a pit kiln, things start to fall apart. Her fellow artists begin to act in troubling ways. The eccentric fiber artist knits an endless scarf. The musician plays the same carousel song over and over until his fingers bleed. The calligrapher grins with ink-stained teeth. Not to mention the haunting dreams Sarah has night after night.

When she discovers glass shards in her clay, Sarah wonders if someone is out to get her—or if she’s losing her grip on reality out here in the wilds, where the pounding of the waterfall never, ever fades. As she investigates the beautiful valley and the crumbling resort looming over them all, she unearths a chilling past that refuses to remain buried . . .

Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!

I gotta say, this Halloween season went by way too fast. I had a Halloween party this past weekend and a number of my friends and I were lamenting that October went by so fast, especially since the election is next week and none of us feel totally ready to see how that is going to shake out. Hell, my anxieties about that has plagued me pretty much all year, no doubt contributing to my near mental breakdown this past summer, some health problems, and the fact that I am SO behind on my reading as we enter the last two months of the year. But the horror I’ve read this month as been great, and I am SO thrilled to end my favorite month with Delilah S. Dawson’s newest novel “It Will Only Hurt for a Moment”. I loved her book “The Violence”, and this new one sounded like a perfect Halloween read. And it definitely scratched not only the scary itch, but also the dread that I’ve been feeling as of late thanks to the pulsing feminine rage this book has. Because same, girl.

As a horror novel it ticks a lot of the boxes that I really enjoy. Is there an isolated setting? Check. Is there a dark history to said isolated setting? Check. Is there a wide swath of strange characters who could be hiding something? Check. Are there ghosts? Big ol’ check. We follow Sarah, an artist who has been selected to join an artist’s colony/program located in the woods and at the site of an old fancy hotel, who just wants to be able to process some trauma by delving into pottery and having some self reflection time. But her fellow artists start acting strange, she starts having bad dreams, and she finds a long buried corpse that went unnoticed, and who appears to have tried to claw her way out of her coffin. I really enjoyed the way that Dawson slowly pieces together the mystery and slowly turns the dial of tension up so that the scares build and creep up slowly until they burst. The descriptions of the weird things that her fellow artists were doing, or the strange dreams that she was experiencing, were strange and surreal and unnerving to be sure.

But what worked best for me in this was the way that Dawson compares and contrasts the kinds of misogyny and abuse that women have had to contend with throughout history to that which they have to contend with today, peeling back insidious ways that the treatments have, in some ways, become more insidious and clandestine. In the modern time Sarah is reeling from the end of a long term relationship with her boyfriend Kyle, who she had come to realize was manipulative and emotionally abusive towards her. As she looks back at the relationship she sees the way he’s isolate her, how he’s denigrate her interests and separate her from her circle of friends, how he made sure that she was always dependent on him and felt the need to put him before herself. As she starts to learn the dark secrets of Tranquil Falls, and the history of the site and the way that women there were trapped within the confines of the era in which it was at its height, we find out horrors of women who were discarded, silenced, abused, and locked away for treading outside the expectations of their gender. There are some VERY upsetting moments portrayed in this book that could definitely be triggering for some people, so take that into account. But the rage and the fighting back that Sarah does, and the ghosts of the women who were subjected to such madness and violence make their rage and resistance known as well. I found it to both amplify my very present anxieties regarding next week, but to also give it a catharsis in some ways. Shitty men rarely get away with their shittiness in a Delilah S. Dawson novel, and I, for one, really needed to see that play out. Even if it terrified me at times and set me on edge.

“It Will Only Hurt For a Moment” is another stellar horror novel from Delilah S. Dawson, brimming with secrets and understandable anger. It’s not too late to pick it up for one last horror tale for the season.

And with that, Horrorpalooza comes to an end once more. And it feels like the right read to end with this year. I’m still feeling so much dread and terror about how next week’s election is going to go. But it’s good to see that there are other people who are making art to reflect similar feelings. Happy Halloween everyone. I hope that you all have a safe and fun and spooky holiday tonight. I hope that I can leave my personal terrors behind and it stays limited to this most wonderful holiday.

Rating 8: Filled with an eerie build up and many bursts of feminine rage, “It Will Only Hurt for a Moment” is a seething horror novel about misogyny, both old and new.

Reader’s Advisory:

“It Will Only Hurt for a Moment” is included on the Goodreads list “October 2024 Horror”.