“Protect you against Rot, Daughter.

Shudder with the thought of it, that worst thing. Rot like the gone-bad-on-the-inside of fruit, like biting into an apple without checking for holes and my mouth filling up with a rancid brown mush. Worse than a foul mouthful of Rot that comes from outside the fence. If that kind of Rot got into me or Myma then we would be the gone-bad apples. Us Rotters. Everything inside us eaten away. I wouldn’t be Mud any more. I wouldn’t be any name at all. I wouldn’t even be Daughter.”

Rowe Irvin’s Life Cycle Of A Moth (2025) is a wonderful and haunting debut novel. Irvin uses beautifully poetic language to explore the dysfunctional relationship between a mother and daughter who live together in the forest, whose lives are disrupted by the appearance of a stranger. Life Cycle Of A Moth powerfully explores the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship, what happens when a mother’s desire to protect her child shades into control and abuse, and the aftermath of sexual violence. It’s a dark book, and there are elements of folk horror for sure, but the remarkable thing about it is just how beautiful and compelling Irvin’s writing makes this story, whilst never shying away from the very real horrors it’s talking about. The end result is deeply moving and utterly compelling. It heralds Irvin as an exciting new voice in the literary Weird. 

The novel is told across two strands, one linear, one structured around a moment of great trauma. One strand follows Maya, a woman who wakes up in the forest after being brutally raped and beaten, and decides to live in an abandoned house she finds in the middle of the forest, abandoning human society entirely. As the novel progresses, we learn more about Maya’s background, growing up queer in a small town, surviving the breakdown of her family due to her father’s alcoholism, staying at home after her friends move away to look after her sick mother, leading up to the moment of violence that severs her life irreparably from her past. The other strand is set some sixteen years later, and follows Daughter, Maya’s child, who has grown up with Maya in the forest. Daughter has been brought up by Maya to believe that the world outside the forest is contaminated with Rot, which will infect and destroy her and her mother if they should ever leave. She and Maya live off the land in a world of ritual and routine, following the change of the seasons. Their life is disrupted when Wyn, a homeless man with striking long red hair, finds them and becomes a part of their lives. This intrusion threatens the foundations that Maya has built their shared world on, and soon Daughter will have to learn the truth about the world she lives in.

Irvin is a master of voice. The sections from Maya’s perspective are told in a close third person, but the sections from Daughter’s point of view are told entirely in her voice. Irvin does a remarkable job of capturing the mixture of naivety, curiosity and worldliness required to make the character work. Daughter has an unusual, poetic syntax, a result of her being brought up in the woods isolated from any other human being apart from her mother. She finds the new words and concepts that Wyn brings with him from the outside world confusing or meaningless. Her worldview is entirely circumscribed by the stories Maya has told her to keep out the outside world, and we get a wonderful sense of someone pushing at the edges of their understanding, beginning to suspect that the things they have been told their whole life might not be true. Thus Daughter is the eponymous moth, the book taking us through three distinct stages of her evolution as a person.

Maya and Daughter’s relationship is deeply unhealthy. They are co-dependent, largely due to how Maya has raised her. This is made all the more heart-wrenching by the fact that the book makes sure we understand why Maya has done this. The trauma of the sexual violence she experienced has led her to turn her back on the world that allowed such a thing to happen to her, hence she has constructed this elaborate fantasy bolstered by rituals and routines to keep the outside out. She has brought up Daughter entirely within this invented world because she is terrified that Daughter may one day face the same violence. Maya uses self-harm as a way to coercively control Daughter’s behaviour, even going so far as to threaten to hang herself as a way of stopping Daughter from asking inconvenient questions. As a result, Daughter has no concept of people outside of her mother, nor does she have any awareness of her own budding sexuality. The dynamic between the two characters is incredibly well drawn, and Irvin pushes both Maya and Daughter past their limits over the course of the plot, as Daughter emerges into her Imago phase and must take control of her and Maya’s destinies, despite being woefully unprepared.

Life Cycle Of A Moth will inevitably draw comparisons to 2025’s other great folk horror novel about a dysfunctional mother/daughter relationship, Lucy Rose’s The Lamb. I think this is bad luck in terms of the publishing schedules as much as anything else, though it’s interesting for sure that two books on this theme have come out in the same year. Certainly, both books are good enough to stand the comparison, and Irvin and Rose are two very different authors who approach the core concept very differently and take it in completely different directions. Fans of Weird fiction, folk horror, and books about dysfunctional family relationships should read both and be glad that we’re being so well served this year.

Irvin’s command of language is impeccable. The prose of Life Cycle Of A Moth is meticulously constructed, with the ear for sound and rhythm worthy of a poet. Her character work is also excellent. Though the novel is intentionally claustrophobic, with the focus very much on its three leads, Maya, Daughter and Wyn are such well-drawn and compelling characters that the reader is happy to spend the time with them. The forest they live in is almost a character itself, described in vivid detail and reflecting the moods of the characters back at them. Irvin has written a modern masterpiece. 

Life Cycle of a Moth  is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org