She’s not just telling scary stories; she’s writing works of unease. She understands that the deepest fears are the ones that feel both foreign and familiar, the stranger in the woods, the lover in your bed who turns cruel, the ancient ritual in your modern town, the terrifying thought that your own mind might be betraying you. This novel crawls. It burrows. It lingers. You might feel a faint, phantom tremor just under your skin. And you’ll understand.
Scratch.
It starts there. A simple, human reflex. But in Gemma Amor’s world, a scratch is never just a scratch. It’s an archaeology. You dig through layers of skin, of memory, of polite fiction to get at the pulsing, infected truth underneath. ITCH! knows this. It operates on that primal level. You read about Josie feeling the ants, always the ants, and your own nerve endings fire in useless sympathy. A masterpiece of somatic suggestion.
Josie’s at rock bottom. A phrase we throw around, but Amor makes you feel the gritty impact of it. She’s crawled back to her hometown on the edge of the Forest of Dean, licking wounds from an abusive girlfriend named Lena. All tall, dense pines and long shadows. It’s the kind of place you leave, not return to. Her return feels less like a choice and more like a gravitational collapse.
Then she finds the body. An ecosystem of decay, crawling, teeming. Ants. The description isn’t gratuitous; it’s foundational. It lodges in your brainpan. Josie, in a moment of pure, horrifying misfortune, passes out face-first into this nightmare. From that second, the infestation is total. The ants are on her, yes, but the real horror is the idea of them. The feeling. It burrows into her psyche. Is it PTSD? A psychotic break? Or is the forest, with its ancient, grimy folklore, literally getting under her skin?
Amor weaves this internal chaos with an external mystery that’s equally oppressive. There’s a masked predator in the woods, they say. An annual festival called Devil’s March, more ritual than revelry. The village has its secrets, wrapped in tradition and sealed with a warning glance. Josie, buzzing with her own private horror, becomes an unstable catalyst. She pokes at things. Asks questions. The local detective finds her a nuisance, or maybe a suspect. How convenient to be the one who finds not one, but two victims.
This is where Amor’s skill shines. The narrative isn’t a straight line from crime to solution. It’s a spiral. Josie’s investigation into the murders twists back into an investigation of her own past, her fractured childhood, her complicated grief over a parent. The forest’s secrets and her personal secrets start to look like branches of the same rotten tree. The abuse from Lena wasn’t an anomaly; it felt like a continuation of a pattern, a vulnerability carved into her long before she left town.
The folk horror element isn’t just set dressing. It’s the engine. It’s not about jump scares in cornfields. It’s about the weight of history, the tyranny of an insular community, the way old beliefs warp into new cruelties. The “Devil’s March” isn’t a quaint tourist attraction; it’s a pressure valve, a sanctioned release of something dark. Amor taps into that uniquely British vein of rural terror, where the landscape itself feels conscious and malign. It’s reminiscent of The Wicker Man’s slow-burn dread, but with a distinctly modern, feminist lens. The monsters here aren’t always supernatural. Sometimes they’re just men. Sometimes they’re the people you love. Sometimes they’re the voices in your own head, sounding an awful lot like your abuser.
Let’s talk about the body horror. Amor has form here, look at Full Immersion’s exploration of a fractured mind or the raw transformation in her short story Feral. But in ITCH!, it’s relentless. The sensation of crawling. The compulsive need to scratch until you bleed. It’s a brilliant, disgusting metaphor for trauma. Trauma itches. It’s a memory that won’t heal, a thought you can’t stop picking at. Josie’s physical infestation is a manifestation of the psychological one. The abuse, the guilt, the grief, it’s all a swarm inside her. You can’t reason with it. You can only feel it move.
Amidst all this darkness, Amor plants pockets of fierce, fragile light. Mainly in Angela, Josie’s pub landlord. She’s a glorious creation. No-nonsense, protective, a solid anchor in Josie’s dissolving world. She doesn’t coddle, but she stands firm. Their relationship offers a glimpse of what healthy support can look like, a counterpoint to the toxicity that has defined so much of Josie’s life. It’s a necessary reprieve, a reminder that not everything in Ellwood is rotten.
The climax, as the village dons its masks for the Devil’s March, is a torrent. Amor shifts gears from a creeping dread to a propulsive, almost frenetic race . The threads, the murders, the folklore, Josie’s memories, pull taut and then snap together.
ITCH! solidifies Gemma Amor as a major voice in horror. She’s not just telling scary stories; she’s writing works of unease. She understands that the deepest fears are the ones that feel both foreign and familiar, the stranger in the woods, the lover in your bed who turns cruel, the ancient ritual in your modern town, the terrifying thought that your own mind might be betraying you. This novel crawls. It burrows. It lingers. You might feel a faint, phantom tremor just under your skin. And you’ll understand.
Itch by Gemma Amor
READERS LOVE GEMMA’S DARK, ITCHY WORLD 🐜
‘If you are after something that is both shocking and horrifically beautiful then take a journey and discover this little atrocity for yourself’ 🐜
‘I kept telling myself I really should turn off the light and get to bed now, eyes dry, head heavy, but every sentence in this book commands the reader keep turning the pages and press onward…’ 🐜
‘Gemma pulled me in with this compelling tale. Each page turned yielded me to another. I couldn’t stop. Seriously!’ 🐜
Josie is at rock bottom, living a haunted existence after returning to her isolated hometown on the edge of the Forest of Dean. When she stumbles across a decaying, ant-infested body in the woods, Josie plummets into a downward spiral, facing uncomfortable truths about the victim and her own past – all whilst battling a growing infestation of her mind . . . and her flesh.
Desperate to solve the case, Josie scratches the surface of an age-old mystery – a masked predator stalks the forest around Ellwood, a place deeply gripped by folklore. As the village prepares for its annual festival, Josie gets closer and closer to unveiling a monster, and begins to ask herself:
Are these dark crawling insects leading her to uncover the truth? Or is she their next victim? 🐜
🐜 ‘A deeply felt, haunting folk horror that crawls with secrets and darkness. This disturbing and tender novel possessed me and made my skin crawl. It will keep you up long into the night!’ LUCY ROSE, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamb 🐜
🐜 ‘From the first page, this story is already under your skin, building a nest in your heart’ KYLIE LEE BAKER, New York Times bestselling author of Bat Eater 🐜
🐜 ‘A chilling and tremendously disturbing examination of a wounded mind . . . Sinister and utterly fiendish, ITCH! is a shocking and truly surprising blend of mystery, folk horror, and body horror that will burrow deep in your softest places, into your tenderest, most unspoiled secret parts’ ERIC LAROCCA, award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke 🐜
🐜 ‘ITCH! places Gemma Amor firmly at the top of today’s horror talent pool . . . I couldn’t have loved this more. It’s under my skin now, and it itches! One of the year’s absolute must-reads! CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Birds and The House of Last Resort 🐜
🐜 ‘An exquisitely crafted, uniquely unnerving horror story told with stunning empathy. ITCH! has all the makings of a horror classic’ RACHEL HARRISON, USA TODAY bestselling author of So Thirsty 🐜
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