Your baby is cooing, babbling, taking her first tottery steps — all of it making you deliriously happy.
She is absolutely perfect.
But wait, what is that splinter-like black thing sticking out of her plump, soft skin? You frantically thumb through the Bible for new parents: the American Academy of Pediatrics “Caring for Your Baby and Young Child.”
Or, if you are Nora Pacetti, you ask your mother because, being an Italian mamma, her knowledge of raising children eclipses that of a hospital full of pediatricians. But even Nonna Pacetti can’t figure this one out. And now, to Nora’s horror, another black needle has pierced her baby’s skin. And another.
“Pinfeathers” ($30, Berkley; out Nov. 17) is a delightfully unsettling read — a witch’s brew, blending a generous helping of David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror classic, “The Fly,” with a dash of “Rosemary’s Baby,” as well as a pinch of “X-Men.”
North Side author Christina Henry’s latest horror novel probably isn’t for an expectant mother because no infant Tylenol, extra fluids or a warm bath is going to stop baby Olivia’s prickly nubs from sprouting into feathers or the hard, sharp thing inside her throat lunging out to grab a sandwich, a finger or anything else juicy within reach.
“Despite the fact that there is this very unusual thing happening to [Nora’s] daughter, the book actually is really just an expression of the parental anxiety around illness, difficulty, things that you don’t expect when you become a parent,” said Henry, looking suitably witchy, her ebony-dark hair streaked silver, black nail polish and a black cardigan decorated with toadstools and dragonflies.
We’re chatting at a favorite hangout, Hexe Coffee, located in the old Lathrop public housing project at 2000 W. Diversey Parkway. She’s wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “I like books more than people.” But if she is a witch, she’s a friendly, engaging one.
“Pinfeathers” is Henry’s 20th novel. Many, but not all, are set in Chicago.
“I’ve had a very strange career, in that I’m not a household name, but my books sell consistently and they keep selling,” Henry said.
Her latest begins within the claustrophobic confines of a North Side condominium. But a baby morphing into — spoilers here and below — a huge condor-eagle hybrid doesn’t belong in a condo. Olivia belongs in a secret lab, or so the ruthless Dr. Noel Cassidy believes, to be poked, prodded and possibly plucked. Maddeningly for Dr. Cassidy, clinical efficiency is no match for a mother’s love or a grandmother’s paranoia.
Henry, the mother of a 20-year-old engineering student, said the idea of a baby sprouting feathers came to her, like the central theme of all of her books, from the “primordial ooze” in her brain.
“Like a perfectly normal person, I have to write a book to find out what I’m seeing in my head,” she said.
Henry grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, an “unmonitored” Gen-Xer.
“Horror was part of my childhood in a really visceral way,” she said. “Nobody really paid attention to what we were watching and what we were reading.”
Henry and her teenage friends clung to each other during sleepovers and screamed through the likes of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Dead Ringers” and “Halloween.”
Master horror storyteller Shirley Jackson and English gothic horror writer Angela Carter are among her influences.
“Stephen King is sort of an overarching influence on probably every horror author who came out of the ’80s because he was so ubiquitous,” Henry said.
Henry crafts her own stories at home in her Wrigleyville graystone, so close to the home of the Cubs that, “when the wind blows in from the east, I can hear the seventh-inning stretch,” she said.
She writes by hand — at least to begin with.
“It helps me access a deeper part of my brain,” she said. “I don’t plan out my books. I just start writing them.”
But Wrigleyville feels like an odd place for a horror writer to settle and find inspiration, too much noise and bustle at all hours for ghosts or axe murderers to feel at home.
Not so, said Henry. In fact, her last novel, “The Place Where They Buried Your Heart,” is set in an abandoned house in Wrigleyville, a home drenched in generations of human blood.
“It is really a love letter to the neighborhood in a strange sort of way,” Henry said.
