literary gluttony

Rating: ★★★★½

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“What they took from us, we bury. What they left behind, we burn.”

Some books don’t just ask to be read—they demand it.
They whisper from your nightstand, promise bruises and revelations, and leave you gasping in the dark. Kristi DeMeester’s Dark Sisters is exactly that kind of novel—a fevered, feral hymn to womanhood, religious trauma, and the sticky, spiraling legacy of inherited pain.

From the first page, you’re not just reading—you’re being drawn in, barefoot and unwilling, into the swampy, Southern-scorched aftermath of a cult that never truly let go. The story follows three women—sisters in faith, in suffering, and in survival—as they claw their way out of a deeply warped religious community. But freedom doesn’t come clean. Outside the cult, the real world offers no absolution. Only more shadows, more scars, and more things lurking in the bloodline.

🥀 A Book That Bleeds

DeMeester’s prose is thick and unrelenting.
Every sentence pulses with unease, every scene unfolds like a wound being peeled open. Think: Sharp Objects meets The VVitch, but darker, hungrier. The pacing is deliberate—not slow, but coiled—wrapping itself tighter with each chapter. The horror here is not just in what’s seen, but in what’s felt—the things too sacred, too broken, too female to name aloud.

This is horror that is both intimate and cosmic. The supernatural creeps in not with a roar, but with a whisper that might just be your mother’s voice. Or your own. It’s body horror stitched to emotional trauma, and it’s absolutely riveting.

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✝️ Womanhood, Witchcraft, and Wrath

Dark Sisters is soaked in feminist rage and haunted femininity.
Its magic is not spark and spectacle—it’s dirt-under-the-fingernails, blood-on-the-linoleum, scream-into-a-pillow real. The women in this book are raw and unapologetically complicated. Survivors, yes. But not saints. And DeMeester doesn’t clean them up for comfort.

Religious trauma is central here—not just the act of leaving it behind, but what remains when you do. What happens when the sacred becomes something poisonous? When faith is twisted into control? And how do you reclaim power that was taught to make you feel ashamed?

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🕯️ Minor Quibbles in the Shadows

There are moments where the narrative gets lost in its own mythos. Some scenes feel a touch too dreamlike, drifting into symbolism at the expense of clarity. But honestly? It kind of works. That blurred line between what’s real and what’s remembered—or maybe repressed—only deepens the novel’s haunted atmosphere.

This book doesn’t want to hold your hand. It wants to drag you into the woods and leave you there to see what you become.

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🍽️ Devour or Nibble?

Devour it.
Read Dark Sisters with the lights low, your phone off, and something red and bitter in your glass.
It’s heavy. It’s harrowing. It’s holy in the most unholy of ways.

If you crave horror that’s lush, literary, and laced with teeth—pull up a chair.
There’s a place for you at this table.

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📚 Have you read Dark Sisters? Drop your thoughts in the comments below or tag @LiteraryGluttony on Instagram and let’s talk about feminine rage, unholy rituals, and the books that leave bruises.

**I received a copy of this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.**