Nightbitch
Rachel Yoder's 2021 debut is narrated by a former gallery artist, identified only as the Mother, who has put her career on hold to stay home with her two-year-old son in an unspecified Midwestern suburb while her engineer husband travels for work most weeks. She is sleep-deprived, isolated, and quietly furious, and one night she notices a patch of coarse new hair on the back of her neck, an extra row of nipples, sharper canines, and an appetite for raw meat. The book moves on the premise that she is, slowly and matter-of-factly, turning into a dog at night. Yoder uses that conceit to write the truest sentences any recent novel has produced about the rage, monotony, and animal physicality of early motherhood, with side trips into a bizarre book of feminist mythology she finds at the library. Nightbitch was adapted into a 2024 Searchlight film starring Amy Adams.
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A new mother who has put her art career on hold begins to notice strange physical changes: extra hair, sharper teeth, a craving for raw meat at night. She might just be losing it. She might be turning into something else.
Yes. Searchlight Pictures released a 2024 film adaptation directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams. The film follows the novel's premise of a stay-at-home mother who believes she is turning into a dog.
Nightbitch blends literary fiction, body horror, and dark feminist comedy. Many readers find the body-transformation imagery genuinely disturbing while also funny. It is more existential than supernatural.
Nightbitch was written by Rachel Yoder, published in 2021 by Doubleday.
Nightbitch is 260 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Nightbitch takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Nightbitch is a standalone novel by Rachel Yoder, not part of a series.
Nightbitch is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.