Until Death - by Mary Berman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In this fresh, darkly funny horror debut, a woman finally agrees to marry the man of her mother's dreams . . . only to discover that wedding planning eats you alive.

If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it's that getting married is a bad idea. But if she's learning anything from her widowed mother's dementia, it's that dying alone is even worse. So when she meets Luke, the handsome heir to a local vineyard, dating him makes sense. And when he asks her to marry him, well. It's what her mother always wanted.

But none of Ophelia's obsessive scrolling on wedding forums can prepare her for the nightmare of planning her own. Why is her mother-in-law so worried about every single detail, right down to the color scheme? Why does it feel like Ophelia is losing track of days, weeks, even months? Why is Luke's family so eager to host the wedding in the vineyard's ancient chapel -- and why does it feel, sometimes, like the chapel has a heartbeat?

This wedding is supposed to be the thing that saves Ophelia from a lifetime of loneliness. So how is it that the more Ophelia sacrifices, the more alone she is?

Shot through with wicked humor, pitch-black horror, and unexpected romance, Until Death is a deliciously dark send-up of the wedding industrial complex -- and a mother-daughter story unlike any you've read before.

Review Quotes

"If an Ottessa Moshfegh meet-cute stumbled into the eco-horror gardens of Jeff Vandermeer, you still wouldn't quite pin down this haunting debut. By turns wryly humorous and progressively horrific, Berman serves up an exploration of how far we'll go to care for our families with a reveal that will wrap around your body and worm its way under your skin."--Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark

"Mary Berman is my favorite kind of writer, one who delivers a great story with great sentences. She's an exciting new voice, one to watch."--Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

"Recognizes the Gothic horror inherent to planning a wedding and creates from it a darkly hilarious, painfully incisive, and genuinely haunting fever dream of identity, love, and the binding power of family obligation. A compulsively readable debut that vividly captures the ways we contort ourselves to be what others need."--Kay Chronister, author of The Bog Wife

About the Author

Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based author. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi, and her stories have been published in Cicada, the horror podcast PseudoPod, the Hugo-nominated Diabolical Plots, and elsewhere. She is a Pitch Wars alum and a winner of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship for female horror writers, and she has attended the Bread Loaf and Viable Paradise workshops. Exploring the horrors of daughterhood and the wedding industrial complex, Until Death is her debut novel.