Brides In the Dark by Jacob Steven Mohr Review: A Dark Fairy Tale of Harpies and Hidden Truths

Marriage has always worn two faces. One beams from gilded frames, lace and promise; the other lurks in ledger books, dowries, and the quiet transfer of ownership that centuries of custom made unremarkable. It’s the second face, the one that reduces a bride to property, that horror keeps returning to, and it’s this face that Jacob Steven Mohr turns to the light in his new horror novella, Brides In the Dark. This Brides In the Dark review comes not to spoil the tale but to set the stage for a story that understands how the old ways still ache beneath the skin of modern romance.

Mohr is not a newcomer to darkness. His 2020 novel The Unwelcome carved a reputation for quiet, creeping dread anchored in domestic spaces; his short fiction collection A Little Black Book of Stories showed a writer comfortable with the strange and the sorrowful. With Brides In the Dark, published by Quill & Crow Publishing House, he steps into the realm of the dark fairy tale, a sub-genre enjoying a vigorous renaissance.

Recent years have given us Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy, a savage mermaid fable, and Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest, a folkloric nightmare of bargains and lost children. Horror audiences, hungry for narratives that reclaim mythology from sanitised Disneyfied retellings, have embraced these grim fictions. Mohr’s novella arrives at exactly the right cultural moment, when readers are willing to ask what was stolen when the old stories were scrubbed clean.

Quill & Crow Publishing House; 87 Pages; Available Now on Amazon

Ahhhh, marriage. The swooning music, the ceremonial pageantry, the vows, the kiss. Wedded bliss may not be all it’s cracked up to be (according to the Pew Research Center, 1.8 million Americans divorced in 2023), but the promise of a love-filled future keeps couples coming back to the altar. Yet marriage wasn’t always the ultimate romantic union we understand it today. For centuries arranged marriages were standard practice, meant more to cement business and community loyalties, or royal alliances. In ancient times marriage was often about ownership; daughters became commodities, to be sold from an intended bride’s father to the prospective husband in exchange for property or wealth.

It’s that harsher side of marriage that takes wing in Jacob Steven Mohr’s new Quill & Crow Publishing House novella, Brides In The Dark. Set in a seaside village of Blackfrye in the days of yore, the novella concerns itself with Patrick, the son of Blackfrye’s gruff, one-eyed patriarch, Old Matthew. It’s tradition for each of Blackfrye’s male youth to venture to the nearby mountaintop on the eve of their eighteenth birthday to capture a bride from among the untamed raven-haired women who inhabit the wilds.

Those captive brides henceforth become Blackfrye’s wives and mothers: nameless, servile, and mute. Patrick has never had reason to question his village’s curious custom, and now that he’s of age, it’s his turn to make the journey to the mountain. He intends to use honey as a lure, to attract ‘a sweet bride’, but the evening before his trek, Patrick’s mother secretly gives him a most unusual item to use instead: a small bouquet of mysterious flowers.   

Over the next day and night, Patrick struggles against the elements to reach his destination, and upon doing so he learns the strange truth regarding Blackfrye’s tradition. The wild women of the woods are in fact harpies—mythic half-human, half-bird creatures—who, once their wings are sheared and hidden away, become enslaved to their husbands’ will. 

Using the lure his mother gave him, Patrick succeeds in ensnaring a harpy, but when the feisty beast reveals his mother’s true name it unnerves him. Unable to go through with severing the harpy’s wings, the two cut an unprecedented bargain: if Patrick agrees to take the harpy—who calls herself Stella—to see his mother, Stella will submit to being his bride. Transforming during the daylight hours into a normal human woman, Stella returns to Blackfrye with Patrick, but her arrival immediately sets off a chain of events that upends everything Patrick believed he knew about his home, his family—and himself.

Subtitled A New Fairy Tale, Brides In the Dark effortlessly evokes the dreamy, dusky atmosphere of the classic fable. Mohr’s prose possesses a poetic quality perfectly suited to the story, with Gothic flourishes and memorable turns of phrase that linger long after the last line has been read. Theme-wise, the novella is about secrets. Whether kept to protect oneself or another, secrets have the power to destroy; both of Patrick’s parents keep their true natures secret from him, and the result transforms not only his image of each, but the entirety of the life he once knew.

In this way, secrets can be equated with, if not lies, than withheld truth. Indeed, the only character who is completely honest with Patrick is Stella—technically a monster—and though the truths she reveals about his mother and grandmother are devastating to him, they also illuminate the extent of Old Matthew’s wrongdoing. Manipulative and cunning, Matthew’s lust for control and eagerness for violence is the physical embodiment of patriarchal dominance, and through the course of the story he is revealed to be more monstrous than Stella and her inhuman ilk.

At a brisk 87 pages, with its well-drawn characters, intriguing twists, and gloomy ambiance, Brides In The Dark will leave readers wanting more of Mohr’s creations, and it’s for that reason that I grant it a perfectly respectable 3.5 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. This is one marriage that’s sure to stand the test of time.

Brides In The Dark by Jacob Steven Mohr

In Wicke, menfolk hunt their wives in the dim forests. On the Burning Coast, they snatch them from the sea. But in Patrick’s mountain village of Blackfrye, lonely boys lure their brides down from the night sky itself. And these, everybody knows—these make the happiest marriages of them all. But when the young shepherd scales the mountain to win a wife of his own, he gets almost more than he can handle with Stella. She’s got bats’ wings, for one—and a tongue far sharper than her yellow fangs.

And in exchange for her hand in wedlock, she wants something from Patrick in return…something that, once given, might turn his humble home upside-down forever. Can Patrick and his feral bride-on-the-wing find happiness in the world of men? Or will a silent horror rotting under Blackfrye consume them both?