{"id":12344,"date":"2025-09-10T14:37:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T14:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/12344\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T14:37:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T14:37:09","slug":"its-a-baby-santa-fe-reporter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/12344\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s A Baby! – Santa Fe Reporter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting outside the entryway of the rustic Roots Farm Caf\u00e9 in the small village of Tijeras, local horror author Rachel Eve Moulton readies herself to talk with SFR about her third novel, Tantrum<\/a> (Penguin Random House, Aug. 2025), as her two daughters take turns petting the cafe\u2019s resident cat.<\/p>\n

Following her previous novels in the feminist horror niche, Tinfoil Butterfly and The Insatiable Volt Sisters, her latest book is the first to be set in New Mexico, specifically in the Sandia Mountains spanning the east side of Albuquerque.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The haunted house Tantrum takes its readers to is that of Thea, a mother of three who knew the second she saw her third child Lucia\u2014her first daughter\u2014that she was not human. Lucia is hungry, ravenous. She knows no bounds, and she\u2019s much stronger and smarter than any three-month-old baby should be. Thea does not know what to do when Lucia\u2019s hunger directs itself from raw meat to live chickens to her own brother. Thea cannot let anyone know about her daughter\u2019s insatiability, not even her own husband.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moulton\u2019s punchy, yet cathartic venture through one day in the life of a mother trying to stop her daughter\u2019s aberrant behavior from bubbling over\u2014and a deep dive into Thea\u2019s lifetime of being restrained herself\u2014is a quick but impactful read. Her examination of motherhood, and what harm is purposefully or unconsciously passed down to daughters taught to keep the monster locked inside them, will draw any reader in, even through Thea\u2019s initial hardened exterior and Lucia\u2019s sharp teeth. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.<\/p>\n

My first question is the obvious one everyone goes for: What would you say first inspired you to\u00a0 write Tantrum?<\/p>\n

When my first daughter was born, when I first met her. You go through pregnancy, and labor takes forever, and it\u2019s uncomfortable\u2014and then you\u2019re introduced to this human being. And I had this reaction where I actually was holding her and screaming in her face, \u201cIt\u2019s a baby. It\u2019s a baby!\u201d And that was the first moment I realized that I had thought I was carrying around some kind of alien monster. Like, deep down in my soul, I did not expect it to be human, but I didn\u2019t know that about myself. So I was like, \u201cOkay, what if I write a book where that feeling is there, but eventually it turns out to be true, and the thing born is actually a monster.\u201d\u00a0 It was very voice-driven to that experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With this specific plot and its use of the monstrous child trope, it felt familiar to me. I grew up reading and watching stuff like Rosemary\u2019s Baby, The Fifth Child, The Omen. Can you tell me about your sources of inspiration crafting Lucia as a character?<\/p>\n

I love those things that you\u2019re referencing, absolutely adore. There\u2019s, of course, Night Bitch, which is a more recent book by Rachel Yoder. That is fantastic. Another one called Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth\u2014really stunning. Another one that\u2019s not horror that I really like is Miranda July\u2019s All Fours. I think right now, literature that is horror or horroresque that talks very plainly about experiences about being female in a more raw way that I can relate to\u2014I\u2019m very interested in that, and thinking about kids. Lucia\u2019s a baby. I\u2019ve got my own experience with my own kids, but also just really connect with working with young people. I think they\u2019re the most interesting people in the room. Often, they\u2019re the most genuine people in the room, so I gravitate towards that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is there anything that you would say that\u2019s specifically different about writing a \u201cmonstrous child\u201d who\u2019s a girl as opposed to a boy?<\/p>\n

I think that we\u2019re all kind of monstrous. If we\u2019re saying we\u2019re not, we\u2019re in denial. I think there was an interesting thing that happened for me when I found out I was having girls. When we found out that they were going to be girls, I did have this kind of misogynistic reaction that was like, \u201cOh crap, now I have to help them get through this and this and this and this\u201d\u2026assigned gender doesn\u2019t even mean they\u2019re going to be that gender. The whole thing is dumb, but you have these reactions that are, when they come to the surface, probably hugely challenging in a very helpful way. Thea has two boys, and Lucia\u2019s there to challenge what we think about gender, challenge what we think about what it means to be good or bad, or female, or violent or not. It was really important to me that she was a girl for that reason.<\/p>\n

The book also is very much centered around mother-daughter relationships\u2014not only between Thea and Lucia, but also Thea and her own mother. What aspects of this relationship compel you most as a writer?<\/p>\n

I am very interested in looking into how we pass down trauma\u2014how we do it outright, and how we do it in subtle ways. What doesn\u2019t get solved in the last generation gets passed down, and how do we stop that? What parts of that are we doing that we don\u2019t even know we\u2019re doing? I\u2019m really interested in exploring that, and the best way I connect to it is through mother-daughter stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I think with Thea, her instinct is to hide Lucia, because she has spent her whole life hiding those parts of herself\u2014sometimes from herself, but definitely from others. When she sees it reflected on her daughter, she\u2019s like, \u201cWe just need to handle this. I just need to clean it up,\u201d because your child is an extension of yourself, and it gets confusing..\u00a0<\/p>\n

What do you hope that readers will take away from Tantrum as they finish it?<\/p>\n

I hope that the book allows people to talk more openly about what it means to be a mother, to be a parent, to be ugly, to be violent, to be whatever it is that\u2019s really going on under the surface. Stop being as reserved or polite and just, say the thing. I hope it encourages people to be more honest about who they are, even if they\u2019re nothing like Thea or Lucia.<\/p>\n

I wanted Tantrum not to go the way one might expect, which maybe is more like The Omen or something like that. Without giving anything away\u2026I\u2019m very interested in things that aren\u2019t one thing or the other. Lucia\u2019s a monster, but I didn\u2019t want that to be the only side to Lucia, just like I didn\u2019t, in the end, want Thea only to be angry, only to be a victim, only to be a mom, so I wanted to end the book in a way that fostered empathy even in the most dire of circumstances.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sitting outside the entryway of the rustic Roots Farm Caf\u00e9 in the small village of Tijeras, local horror…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[12225,307,288,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-12344","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-09-10-2025","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}