Book Review: Brood 17

Reviewed by Warren Maxwell

A horrifying exploration of the darkest corners of sexuality

“‘Ivan, you wouldn’t be the first doctor to want to have sex with their patient, and you won’t be the last. I did, too, in my day. Why do you think I’m a teacher?’”

Opening with a horrific, mid-copulation murder, Brood 17 is a dark, rampaging novel about sexuality, violence, trauma, and the way childhood memories come back to haunt us. It follows Misty Dawn, a young woman obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe and suffering from a mysterious “infection” that propelled her to kill her boyfriend and land in a psychiatric hospital for evaluation while awaiting a court date. 

Her psychologist, Doctor Samuel, is the at-times robotic, at-times troubled professional tasked with evaluating Misty Dawn’s mental status and making a recommendation to the court on whether or not her defense of insanity is legitimate. Their conversations, rendered from the dueling perspectives of Misty Dawn and Doctor Samuel, allow strange facts and memories to boil to the surface—like the hideous fate of Misty Dawn’s sister and Doctor Samuel’s painful sexual history—and spark an unorthodox, volatile patient-doctor relationship.

“’I’m just reminding you that you must always tell the truth, and then we can better understand the whys.’

“‘You mean why I fucked my boyfriend in the heart with a butcher knife?’”

Among the book’s singular elements, a brash, unapologetic approach to sex stands out. Although it is not quite an erotic novel, there are no qualms about delving into painful, titillating, and taboo aspects of sex in intense detail. Misty Dawn uses her sexuality as a weapon in a way that is not just abrasive but genuinely disarming on the page. Her and Samuel’s encounters are filled with charged, beautifully orchestrated dialogue. There’s a sense that a chess game unfurls in which Misty Dawn carefully tests Doctor Samuel’s defenses and finds him vulnerable to her aggressive sexual displays. 

While Doctor Samuel’s inability to find an adequate response sometimes begs belief given his professional training and experience, his ever-expanding backstory which includes his repressed childhood and sexless marriage gives credence to his timidity as well as creating a whole other playing field for the novel’s examinations of sex and power dynamics. 

“‘For the record, my parents named me Misty Dawn because I was born when the sun was just touching the sky and the misty rain turned into fog.’”

Brood 17 toes the delicate line of sharp poetic language and the more familiar prose of a thriller expertly. Some moments do appear melodramatic and clunky, perhaps too carefully designed to forward the plot, but the relationship that comes into being between Misty Dawn and Doctor Samuel has a real spark of life and quickly moves in unexpected directions. This is aided by the shifting perspectives that allow subtexts and unspoken secrets to fill out the almost theatrical machinations that play out in repeating psychological interviews. 

What begins as the core question, why did Misty Dawn kill her boyfriend?, quickly becomes sidelined for the far more compelling question of what will happen between her and her doctor and, ultimately, what will these two characters reveal about each other.

“An angel face with Cupid blond curls metastasizes my view. Yes, metastasizes. My new favorite word I intend to use in the most inappropriate ways now that they locked me up.”

A taut psychosexual thriller with darkly poetic prose, Brood 17 imagines the twisted relationship between a beautiful, possibly insane, murderer and the man tasked with evaluating her mental status.

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