Molly believes herself 'immobilized by what-ifs,' but the what-ifs animate this novel, the narrative splitting and looping back on itself as it tries out parallel possibilities, various fantasies and nightmares ... Phillips favors a succession of rapid-fire chapters, some only a few sentences long, and at several points the timeline breaks up so that each new section requires a significant recalibration. The reader, trying to keep track of the chronology, trying hard to make sense of it all, feels the full force of Molly’s panic, the unruly runaway velocity of her life ... Like parenthood itself, The Need is frightening and maddening and full of dark comedy ... Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths. She is very good on drudgery and tiredness and marital resentment ... may well mystify nonparents ... Everyday life, here, is both tedious and fascinating, grotesque and lovely, familiar and tremendously strange.
I haven’t seen an accurate representation of that idea—the otherhood of motherhood—until reading Helen Phillips’s novel ... Phillips deftly conveys the physicality of parenting small children ... a book so smart and brave about motherhood can also be very funny ... The slapstick segues seamlessly into visceral moments in which Molly relishes her children’s corporeal selves ... Molly’s struggle to remain her full self while giving so much of herself away is electrifying. Phillips keeps chapters fast, setting scenes but never allowing the threads, or arresting props to hang around too long. Mothers will recognize so much in this fresh novel — but they aren’t the only ones who should read it. Phillips has found a way to make these experiences universal, acknowledging the importance of the other — the creature without whom none of us would exist.
... a striking mixture of allegory and paranormal horror ... The eerie drama that unfolds seems to symbolize the deranging doubleness of motherhood—its simultaneous states of love and exasperation, and of joy and the fear of 'the abyss, the potential injury flickering within.' The duality also has a physical component. Ms. Phillips is particularly good as portraying Molly’s feeling of estrangement within her postpartum body, which produces milk and floods with hormones as though inhabited by an alien life force ... Ms. Phillips is not always in control of the supernatural elements of her story. Some of the scenes seem creepy for the sake of creepiness, and the ending is oracular rather than climactic. Still, considering its truly bizarre premise, impressive amounts of The Need feel real and true.
... what presents at first as a straightforward thriller is quickly revealed—in a series of short, sharp chapters—to be a sort of narrative nesting doll, a story infused with both essential home truths and a wild, almost unhinged sense of unreality ... Even as the book takes an unsettling turn toward the supernatural, a glassy Black Mirror shimmer on the plot, The Need never abandons its domesticity ... What Helen Phillips builds from the first paragraphs is too clever, and moves too quickly, to be easily ground down in a review. Even the vaguely unfinished ending, less a full stop than a sort of pregnant pause, feels somehow right; a fitting coda to her spare, eerie marvel of novel, both beautifully familiar and profoundly strange.
...mesmerising ... for all the skilled candour of writers from Rachel Cusk to Rivka Galchen, Jenny Offill and Leïla Slimani, nothing I have read gave me quite the same insight into the realm as Phillips’ latest book ... Phillips has mined the dark recesses of every mother’s nightmares — and their fantasies too, which, it turns out, can be just as terrifying when manifested — and laid them bare on the page ... The Need cleverly re-envisages parenthood as a horror story ... Read it as a sci-fi thriller, or understand it instead as metaphorical; either way, it’s a page-turner ... This is a smart, sharp book that cuts to the heart of what it’s like to be a mother.
Helen Phillips's disconcerting new novel starts on a note of thrillerish urgency ... It would be an exaggeration to say that the genre elements function as a booster rocket to manoeuvre the novel into the right narrative orbit, then drop away, but the genre thrusters definitely reduce in intensity. In the uneasy silence that follows, the subject of the book is revealed as the physical and existential experience of motherhood, examined with an attentive realism despite the fantastic elements in the background ... The Need is an examination of the dark side of the best-case scenario, the necessary lamination of joy with fear, adoration with resentment and boredom, all the contradictions that attend the unfolding of an identity predicated on the loss of identity ... It wouldn’t be fair to say that Phillips has painted herself into a corner by starting with a set of misleading signals—truer to say that she has rationed the amount of paint available to be used, after the first few lurid splashes. If the ending of the book works satisfactorily, it’s more because of the goodwill built up over time...than because the situation has been resolved on its own terms
The opening pages of The Need are charged with menace – taut as a baited mousetrap ... As with a sprung trap, once the central conceit of The Need is revealed, the tension of the novel snaps. But what begins as a hyperventilating domestic noir morphs into elegant speculative fiction, and then into a grand hymn to motherhood ... At times bordering on a parental panegyric, The Need is most compelling when most savage ... With her shadowy intruder, [Phillips] has created another metaphor: a canny physical manifestation of the terrors of parenting.
... an unflinching and visceral high-minded thriller that confronts the vectors of motherhood and ultimately personhood ... Phillips’s use of anxiety and fear’s logics are masterful and incisive; at no place does the reader feel unduly manipulated. In fact, she welcomes it. Doubt and self-doubt move the story forward ... Though it is impressive how the book ably uncovers, without a whiff of sentimentality, the intimacy that mundane activities like rinsing berries contain, it’s important to point out that its subversions have limits, but are not necessarily weaknesses ... Though its questions about difference, of self and other, are integral to the narrative, it builds them through a specific mythology of a conventional (read: normative) motherhood, and we can’t ignore how the book starts: Religious zealots are sending death threats to Molly and her team because a Bible has appeared where God is a woman (God forbid!). It is hard not to think of our current moment. It’s an uncomfortable, world-turning circumstance for them that Molly keeps at arm’s length at first, but this layer of the novel’s parable will have readers almost ripping the pages in anticipation and excitement ... shattering and marvelous.
Shirley Jackson meets Jordan Peele in this...page-turner ... There are hints of biblical violence and fissures in the time-space continuum, or maybe it’s just a fever dream. The short, pulse-pounding chapters keep the tension ratcheted up to 11, but darned if you ever really know what’s going on. Neither does Molly, who vacillates between murderous impulse and welcoming acceptance. To say The Need is a twisted version of every mother’s guilty fantasy is not so far a stretch.
In The Need, Phillips fashions an addictive thriller, pairing the highs and horrors of motherhood with the reality bending of science fiction. Her second novel and a follow up to her short story collection...The Need continues Phillips’s threading of speculative elements through what would normally be inescapably mundane ... One of the most brilliant things about The Need is that Phillips knows that the most terrifying thing about parenting isn’t the human monsters that parents fear are living in their children’s lives. It’s the fact that in perilous situations, babies and toddlers are absolutely giddy to do what most likely could get them killed or grievously hurt ... The seamless cutting between timelines is slick at first. The flipping between the heart-stopping invasion day and the timeline of its origin story grows a bit tired over time, but it’s a small price to pay for a novel that keeps you wanting to turn the page.
From the first page, Phillips is writing in several registers of horror at the same time: it’s a juggling act as awe-inspiring as watching a harassed mother pump milk while answering work emails while responding to a nagging toddler ... The terror of the home invasion is perfectly vivid, and so is the disturbing prospect that we’re embedded in the consciousness of a woman who is dangerously split off from reality. Phillips can conjure pure nightmare in a single sentence as she narrates Molly’s thought processes ... Like short-story writers Kristen Roupenian in You Know You Want This and Mariana Enríquez in Things We Lost in the Fire, Phillips revitalises horror tropes by running them through a female point of view ... Phillips’s attentive, unsentimental observations of Molly’s threatened domesticity catch at the heart. Thrillingly disturbing, frighteningly insightful about motherhood and love, and spilling over with offhand invention, The Need is one of this year’s most necessary novels.
... spine-bending suspense...nothing like we expect ... This alternating structure [in flashbacks and present action], which replicates Molly’s juggling act, ratchets up the suspense—if a bit artificially ... Between chills, readers will notice the pleasures of Phillips’s prose. Her style combines the sensibility of a poet with the forward drive of a thriller. (One might say she juggles the two.) Her sentences have a strong, flexible music evocative not only of the action in progress but the feelings that accompany it. Its rhythm can be staccato ... At other times it’s incantatory, a mounting drumbeat of dread ... Phillips’s crystalline style vividly evokes her characters. She draws them so precisely that before we know it, we’re deep inside their lives ... We’re no longer so sure that Molly, in her eternal maternal weariness, is hallucinating ... Read this bewitching, fiercely original novel and find out.
... is in good company and holds its own, giving readers a dark, strange and original look at the perils of motherhood and the heaviness of maternal love ... Phillips brings together Molly and Moll in such an arresting, terrifying and finely crafted manner ... imaginative and beautifully written, but really quite scary as well. Despite its otherworldly ideas and speculative concepts, it is rooted in the real difficulties of mothering, even in the most loving and supportive of situations. Phillips perfectly captures the various elements of daily life with small children ... a fantastic novel. It is sharp and smart, real and impossible, wise, weird, and full of important and uncomfortable truths.
... gives us a woman left alone with her two children to face a haunting that embodies her own worst fears and darkest impulses, revealing modern motherhood as a state of crushing demands and extremes ... reckons less with the broader questions of the multiverse as a scientific possibility than with the intimate yet unspeakably immense questions of motherhood as a human experience. By immersing readers in this state of anxious suspense, Phillips makes the psychic and physical toll of maternity visceral ... Phillips writes about parenthood without sanctimony or air-brushing ... opens with the taut terror of a suspense novel, but its destination is not the twist reveal or the explosive showdown — it’s an exquisitely tender meditation on motherhood’s joys and comorbid torments.
The novel is both an ode to motherhood and a nightmarish rendering of its 'pleasures' and pains ... Phillips structures her astonishing fifth book in edge-of-your-seat mini-chapters that infuse domesticity with a horror-movie level of foreboding, reminding us that the maternal instinct is indeed a primal one.
Phillips teases out this tension to an almost unbearable level ... Phillips explores issues of identity, responsibility, the burden of constant alertness for the sake of young children and their safety, and the relief of sharing this burden. But central to it all is the absolutely fierce love a mother has for her children, a love beside which everything else pales. A skilfully crafted, thought-provoking domestic thriller best for readers willing to embrace ambiguity.
Phillips’ fuguelike novel, in which the protagonist’s tormentor may be either other or self, is a parable of parenting and the anxieties that prey on mothers and fathers, amplified by exhaustion, sleeplessness, the weight of responsibility, and shifting identities and roles. It is also a superbly engaging read—quirky, perceptive, and gently provocative. Molly may be losing her marbles, but we can’t help rooting for her to find herself. While Phillips’ exquisitely existential The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015) found humanity, love, and hope in a dark, dystopian world, this novel locates them in the routine aspects of child-rearing, capturing not only the sense of loss and fear that often attends parenting, but also the moments of triumph and bliss ... Suspenseful and mysterious, insightful and tender, Phillips’ new thriller cements her standing as a deservedly celebrated author with a singular sense of story and style.
... an unforgettable tour de force that melds nonstop suspense, intriguing speculation, and perfectly crafted prose ... Structured in brief, sharply focused segments that shift back and forth in time, the novel interrogates the nature of the self, the powers and terrors of parenting, and the illusions of chronology. Yet it’s also chock-full of small moments—some scary, some tender, some darkly witty—that ground its cerebral themes in a sharply observed evocation of motherhood. With its crossover appeal to lovers of thriller, science fiction, and literary fiction, this story showcases an extraordinary writer at her electrifying best.
