Mary: An Awakening of Terror (2022) by American author Nat Cassidy is a gothic horror novel about Mary Mudgett, a middle-aged woman who faces paranormal entities when she visits her hometown for the first time in decades. The novel explores themes such as the Horror and Invisibility of Middle-Aged Womanhood, the Stigma of Mental Illness and Medical Trauma, and Power, Agency, and Usefulness. Mary is also popular among the BookTok community, a group of readers and book content creators on TikTok.

This guide refers to the 2022 paperback edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss suicidal ideation, sexual assault, child abuse, violence, and murder. The text also uses stigmatizing language about mental health, which is reproduced in this guide only in quotations.

Plot Summary

Forty-nine-year-old Mary lives in New York City and works in an independent bookstore. She often hallucinates that any middle-aged woman’s body—hers included—is decomposing, but a doctor dismisses her problems as related to perimenopause.

When Mary is fired from the bookstore for being too old, she returns to her hometown of Arroyo, Arizona, to care for her aging aunt Nadine despite their difficult relationship. In Arroyo, disgusted by how dirty Nadine’s house is and how crude her aunt is, Mary takes a shower, only to see a nude woman wearing a bloody pillowcase in the bathroom with her. Mary faints from fright.

Nadine takes Mary to the Cross House, a mansion that Mary has seen in her dreams, which serves as the town’s hospital and school. While the doctor, Dr. William Burton, quickly dismisses Mary’s symptoms as perimenopausal, Nancy Ruiz, a nurse, is friendly and empathizes with Mary’s emotional and financial problems. Nancy offers Mary a job in the File Room of the Cross House. As Mary continues seeing dead women similar to the one in Nadine’s bathroom, she realizes that the Cross House holds the truth to her understanding of both these women and herself. She takes the job.

Mary shares her hallucinations with her teenage coworker, Eleanor, who wonders if they are connected to a local serial killer, Damon Cross—the “Jane Doe Killer” who removed all identifying characteristics of his victims before disposing of them with pillowcases on their heads (110). After Mary finds the medical file of the dead woman she saw in Nadine’s bathroom, she and Eleanor discover that her name was Jane Mayhew and that she was a poet.

The next morning, Carole, one of Mary’s childhood bullies, is found murdered in a fashion similar to how Damon killed his victims. As a result, the FBI is called in to investigate. Mary worries that she is Jane Mayhew reincarnated and that she somehow murdered Carole. In the File Room, Mary is attacked by a group of dead women and saved by Victor, the Cross House gardener. Nancy suggests homeopathic remedies from a crystal shop on the outskirts of town to help with her perimenopause.

That night, at the Cross House, Mary desperately wants to talk to Victor about the fact that he can also see the dead women, but he runs away from her. While chasing him, Mary realizes that he is also a ghost.

The next day, Nadine arrives with an armful of medical records that Mary stole from the hospital, getting Mary fired. At home, Mary demands to know why her medical record references an institution called Clearview. Nadine reveals that Mary was a troubled child and bully, which led to her stay in a psychiatric institution. Mary is shocked that she was the bully. The next day, to make amends, Mary goes to the crystal shop to buy Nadine a present. There, the store owner, Barb, calls over her daughter, Anna-Louise Connerton, to talk about reincarnation. Mary faints—Anna-Louise is another of her childhood bullies.

When Mary wakes up, Barb and Anna-Louise are tending to her. It is clear that Anna-Louise has a traumatic brain injury; she tells Mary that a troubled girl attacked her with a bat when they were children. A woman enters the shop to ask if they have seen her son, who is missing. Mary worries that she is responsible for both the missing child and Anna-Louise’s childhood accident.

When Mary returns home, she discovers a grisly scene: Nadine is dying because someone stuffed shards of broken glass figurines down her throat. As Mary tries to save Nadine, the FBI knocks on the door. Mary learns that the anniversary of Damon Cross’s death is the same day as her birthday—she has been reincarnated as Damon himself. Nadine dies from her injuries.

Eleanor, Anna-Louise, and Barb insist on taking Mary to see the council about a journal that Mary scribbled in while in a daze, which contains the same text as Damon’s writings. The council takes off her clothing and sees that she has birthmarks in the exact locations where Damon was shot. Additionally, when they hypnotize her, Mary slashes Anna-Louise’s face just as Damon would have. Shockingly, the council is delighted that she is Damon reincarnated. The community welcomes her, allows her to move into the Cross House, and invites her to participate in the next harvest ritual.

Mary moves into the Cross House and communes with Damon, who shows her his memories. On Mary’s birthday—also the day of the harvest—she returns to Nadine’s house to bury her. The ghost of Jane helps her dig a grave. However, Nadine appears as a ghost and threatens to haunt Mary for eternity.

Mary returns to the Cross House to prepare for the harvest. She reads some of the community’s sacred text—an interpretation of Damon’s journal written by Dr. Burton—but finds it to be obscure and boring. Eleanor brings Mary a birthday gift: a detailed drawing of Mary’s face. While reading some of Jane’s poetry, Mary faints, leading to her almost being late for the harvest.

The harvest turns out to be a violent group sexual assault of a middle-aged woman to cleanse the community’s sins. Mary is encouraged to start the ritual, but she questions why the community is doing this. She ignores Damon’s pleas to participate, attacks Dr. Burton, and flees. Eventually, Burton catches her, drugs her, takes her to the desert, and buries her alive. However, with the help of Jane, Mary escapes her grave and returns with the ghosts of Damon’s victims in tow.

The dead women slaughter everyone in the Cross House and town. Eleanor attacks Mary and reveals that she killed Carole. With the help of Nadine’s ghost, Mary kills Eleanor. The next day, children find broken figurines and body parts in their Easter eggs, and Nancy is shot after an FBI agent finds her in the Cross House’s crawlspace with a knife. It is assumed that Nancy was responsible for the massacre, an assumption that angers Mary and causes her to go in search of the FBI agent to seek revenge.