The Turn by Rachel Feder: A Contemporary Gothic Review

The scariest thing in this Gothic is how easy it is to forget your own story.

The Turn | Rachel Feder | TriQuarterly Books | July 2026 |

Rachel Feder’s The Turn opens with a nanny dreaming of an underwater house, and it never quite lets you feel solid ground again. This contemporary Gothic novella reimagines the classic governess tradition, think Henry James with fangs, for the pandemic era. Baxter, a recent graduate with nowhere else to go, accepts a live-in position with her former professor’s family in the Colorado foothills.

Strange occurrences begin to orbit the household: a baby’s tooth that comes to a point in the moonlight, bruises without explanation, a light moving across the yard at three in the morning. What follows is a slow-creeping piece of literary horror that interrogates memory, motherhood, and the monstrous love between caregiver and child. This is vampire fiction that earns its scares the old-fashioned way: by making you doubt everything you thought you knew.

The Turn by Rachel Feder: A Contemporary Gothic Review

A baby’s tooth comes to a point in the moonlight. That is the moment you realise something has gone wrong. Not just in the house, not just in Baxter’s life, but in the very fabric of what you thought this story was going to be. Rachel Feder’s The Turn opens with a nanny dreaming of an underwater house, seals swimming past the windows like dogs, and it never quite lets you feel solid ground beneath your feet again.

Baxter arrives at Alison and Seb’s split-level home in the Colorado foothills as a recent graduate with nowhere else to go. Schools went online in March, the pandemic scattered everyone she knew, and a live-in nanny position with her former creative writing professor seemed like a lifeline. Five months in, time has become “a thick, viscous patina over everything.” The days blur. The baby cries at night. The neighbour’s tree comes down. And then strange things start happening, small at first: a tooth that should not be sharp, bruises that appear without explanation, a light moving across the yard at three in the morning.

The house is normal. Kitchen counters, playpens, highchairs, the domestic machinery of childcare. But normal feels wrong. Alison wears jeans every day for reasons Baxter cannot parse. The baby monitors are switched off because Alison says they are for the weak. The door to the backyard keeps coming unlocked. And the reader, trapped in Baxter’s first-person uncertainty, starts to question everything. Is that a vampire tooth or just the moonlight playing tricks? Is Seb actually in the hallway at night or was that a dream? Did Baxter really see a figure in the yard or is she losing her grip?

The tension does not build like a rollercoaster, lurching upward in predictable stages. It builds like water rising in a room you cannot find the exit from. By the time you realise how deep you are, the door is already underwater. Feder’s control of this slow-creeping dread is remarkable. She never breaks the spell, never lets the ordinary world fully reassert itself, never gives you a reliable moment to catch your breath.

At sentence level, Feder’s prose is precise and unshowy. She does not need florid description to make you feel the wrongness. It is in the small touches: a baby’s hand slapping against a clavicle “as if to say, there you are”; a lynx that “looked like a man transformed and embarrassed to be seen in his new guise”; the smell of ponderosa pine undercut by something animal and wrong.

The first-person narration keeps everything filtered through Baxter’s increasingly unreliable perception, and Feder uses that filter ruthlessly. We do not know what is real because Baxter does not know. The dreams bleed into the waking world. The memories she cannot access, the gaps in her own story, become the most frightening thing of all.

Structurally, the novella is divided into four parts, and each part tightens the screw. The Gothic governess tradition that Feder explicitly engages with, she cites Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw as a key influence, is not just homage. It is a reframing. Where James’s governess is isolated and possibly mad, Baxter is isolated and being actively manipulated.

The questions about what she saw, what she remembers, what she has been made to forget, are not philosophical puzzles. They are survival mechanisms. The form of the Gothic allows Feder to explore something that feels pressing and contemporary: the way power operates invisibly, the way abuse can be structured into the very architecture of domestic life, the way women are asked to doubt their own bodies and minds.

Beneath the vampire plot, and yes, this is a vampire novel, although it takes its time revealing that fact, The Turn is about something much more uncomfortable. It is about the politics of care. The unpaid or underpaid labour of childcare. The way a young woman with no safety net can be absorbed into a family structure that consumes her. The way motherhood is both weaponised and romanticised.

Baxter is a nanny, a surrogate, a mother who did not know she was a mother, a woman whose body has been used and bruised and fed upon. The vampire is not just a monster in the Gothic sense; it is a metaphor for extraction, for the way certain people are drained to sustain others.

The pandemic setting is not decorative. It is essential. The isolation, the uncertainty, the sense that the normal rules have been suspended, all of it amplifies Baxter’s vulnerability. She cannot leave easily. There is nowhere to go. The world outside is on fire, literally and politically. The wildfires smoke out the mountains. The presidential debates blare on television, a distant catastrophe that feels both urgent and irrelevant.

The AMBER Alert that names Baxter as a kidnapper, that moment when the system designed to protect children becomes a weapon against the woman trying to protect one, hits with the force of a gut punch. Feder does not moralise about any of this. She just lets the machinery of it run, and the horror emerges from how plausible it all feels.

She wrote The Turn while home with a new baby during the pandemic, and you can feel that biographical fact in every page. Not because the book is autobiographical, it is not, but because the questions it asks are the questions of someone who has lived inside the intensity of caregiving, who understands the way a baby’s need can consume you, who knows that love and exhaustion and terror can occupy the same space.

What The Turn confirms is that Feder is a natural storyteller. Her previous work is scholarly and poetic; this is something else. It is a genre novel that takes genre seriously, that uses the machinery of horror to say something true about the world. It is also, against all odds, funny in places. The dark, wry humour of someone who has seen the absurdity of the situation and refuses to pretend otherwise. The baby’s name is Thebes, which is exactly the kind of pretentious choice a creative writing professor would make, and the book knows it.

It sits alongside the work of writers like Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who praises the book’s “slow-creeping sense of doom,” and the Gothic tradition it explicitly invokes. But it is doing something new, too. The pandemic-era setting, the focus on domestic labour and class dynamics, the Gen Z protagonist who is smart and observant and still completely out of her depth, these are not Gothic tropes. They are contemporary realities, and Feder grafts them onto the old form with surprising ease.

Comparable books? The obvious reference point is The Turn of the Screw, but that is only half the story. There is something of Shirley Jackson’s domestic horror here, the sense that the house itself is complicit. There is something of Carmilla in the slow, seductive corruption. But the book that kept coming to mind as I read was something more contemporary: the feeling of being trapped in a situation you cannot fully understand, of having your reality rewritten by someone with more power, of discovering that the person you trusted is the person who has been feeding on you all along. That is a modern horror, and Feder nails it.

The Turn earns its place in the genre not by subverting the Gothic but by taking it seriously, by trusting that the old forms still have something to say. The vampire is not a joke. The Gothic is not camp. These are tools for thinking about predation, about consent, about the way love can be weaponised. And Feder wields them with precision.

By the time you reach the final act, everything clicks into place, not with a tidy resolution, but with a recognition. The novel rewards a second read, the Bloody Flicks review notes, because “you’ll spot things you missed, and they matter.” That is true. The clues are all there, scattered through the early pages, invisible until you know what you are looking for. The tooth in the moonlight. The unlocked door. The bruises that appear without explanation. The baby who pinches and pinches, “as if to say, you’re here.”

What Feder has done is write a horror novel about the horror of not knowing your own story. About having your history rewritten by someone else’s teeth. About the slow, grinding realisation that the life you thought you were living was never yours to begin with. It is a smart book, but it is not a cold one. The love Baxter feels for Thebes, the love that survives the revelation of what he is, what she is becoming, is the most honest thing in the novel. It is messy and fierce and utterly unreasonable. It is the thing that keeps her going when everything else falls apart.

I went into The Turn blind, and I am glad I did. This is the kind of book that works best when you do not know what is coming, when you are as lost as Baxter, when the slow creep of dread has room to do its work. It is a novella, just over 130 pages, and it does not waste a word. Every detail matters. Every image earns its place. The length is perfect for what it is trying to do, long enough to build the world, short enough to sustain the tension.

The monsters in The Turn are not just the ones with fangs. They are the ones who make you forget. They are the ones who rewrite your history while you sleep. They are the ones who convince you that the bruises on your body are your imagination, that the light in the yard was nothing, that the door being unlocked does not mean someone was here. And the horror, the real horror, is how easy it is to believe them.

The Turn by Rachel Feder

A contemporary gothic delving into the power of unmoored lust and familial bonds

When Baxter, a young writer and recent college graduate, accepts a live-in nanny position for an affluent professor’s family in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, she rapidly becomes aware of strange happenings orbiting the family and their children, Quinn and Thebes. After the father becomes estranged and the mother disappears into the night with only one child, Baxter is left utterly lost and in charge of the baby, Thebes, as she struggles to make sense of the bizarre occurrences within the family, the house, and even her own body. But the unnatural occurrences are far from over, and as Baxter stumbles in the dark to protect the child, something sinister stalks the night, looking to sink in its teeth.

For fans of gothic classics such as The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla, The Turn is an eerie and magnificent modern gothic tale about the monstrous bond of love between caregiver and child.

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