'Growing up in the small town of Winston, Pennsylvania feels like drowning. Leah goes to church every Sunday, works when she isn’t at school, and takes care of her baby brother, Owen. Like every girl in Winston, she tries to be right and good and holy. If she isn’t the Lord of the Wood will take her, and she’ll disappear like so many other girls before her.
'But living up to the rigorous standards of the town takes its toll. One night, when Owen won’t stop screaming, Leah wishes him away, and the Lord listens. The screaming stops, and all that’s left in the crib is a small bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon.
'Filled with shame and the weight of the town’s judgment, Leah is forced to cross the river into the Lord of the Wood’s domain to bring Owen back. But the devilish figure who has haunted Winston for generations isn’t what she expects. He tells her she can have her brother back―for the price of a song. A song that Leah will have one month to write.
'It’s a bargain that will uncover secrets her hometown has tried to keep buried for decades. And what she unearths will have her questioning everything she’s been taught to fear.'
Small towns are often portrayed as good, homely, and decent communities where everyone knows each other, neighbours help neighbours, and things are like the ‘good old days’. But small communities tend to hold secrets and darkness, especially when ruled by religion and fear. Tori Bovalino’s latest book is a look at the darkness that such communities contain, of the hate bubbling just beneath the surface, and how old fashioned values can lead to cruelty and bloodshed.
My Throat An Open Grave tells the story of Leah, a teenage girl who’s spent her entire life in the small, hyper-religious town of Winston. Leah has grown up under the teachings of the church, where she and other teenage girls have been taught that sex, or even lustful feelings are a terrible sin. Made to take abstinence pledges, and to wear rings that show that they’re still ‘pure’, the girls of Winston are treated as objects rather than people. Leah is growing more and more resentful of her small town, a town where she’s treated as an outsider, where she doesn’t have many friends, and where her parents treat her with disdain. Forced to look after her younger brother, Owen, Leah is treated as little more than a servant in her own home.
But religion isn’t the only thing that the people of Winston have grown up believing in. There’s also the Lord of the Wood. A mysterious, shadowy figure said to rule the woods on the other side of the river just outside of town, everyone in Winston knows that he’s real, that every few decades he appears and takes a child away. But the Lord of the Wood can only take what he’s offered. When Leah has finally had enough of her life, when she’s fed up with everything, she makes an offer to the Lord of the Wood, and Owen is taken. Now, forced into the wood to retrieve him by the angry leaders of the town, Leah must find a way to save Owen and bring him back safely.
My Throat An Open Grave is advertised as being like the film Labyrinth, and whilst that did pique my interest at first, I quickly found that that comparison falls apart very quickly. There is a deal made with an almost fairy-tale-like figure who steals away a younger brother, which spurs on a quest to save him, but the tone and the content of the story that comes after is completely different. My Throat An Open Grave isn’t some colourful, wondrous adventure filled with magical characters, it’s a story about a hurt, abused young woman learning to understand the trauma that she’s been through and moving through it.
Tori Bovalino has written some dark work before, and I’d say that Not Good For Maidens is much closer in tone to Labyrinth than this book, but it also feels like My Throat An Open Grave is her darkest work yet. There are parts of the book that are genuinely chilling, not because they’re fantastical but because they’re the parts that are very much grounded in reality. There are parts of Leah’s story that are heart-breaking to read, but they’re parts that will feel familiar because they’re stories that we’ve all heard before.
We’ve heard of the kind of familial abuse Leah deals with, with the abusive religious upbringing, because people who’ve lived through that have told their stories. There are times where the book is hard to read, and even though there are parts of the story that I saw coming pretty early on, their full reveal was impactful not because it was a surprising twist but because Bovalino filled the moments with such pathos that it was hard not to feel moved by them.
Whilst My Throat An Open Grave never feels completely original, with many of the story beats being predictable, or the world building having moments that feel borrowed from other stories, the way in which Bovalino puts the very human story at its centre, and the life that she puts into Leah makes the book worth reading. It was this emotional story that kept me hooked, and the way in which it is brought to a conclusion in the final chapters elevates the book. So even if you feel like you’ve read this kind of book before, pick it up and give it a try, because there are some truly spectacular moments to be found in here.
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