Carrying by Samantha Josephs
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Trans MC, gay secondary character, secondary trans characters
PoV: Third-person, present-tense
Published on: 6th October 2026
ISBN: 9798217180684
Goodreads
An audacious, inventive debut and a cult classic in the making, from a thrilling new talent in fiction.
Martha is a trans woman and the picture-perfect Los Angeles housewife, though she is concealing her identity even from her own husband. When she is struck down by a mysterious illness, she begins a series of bizarre experimental treatments that awaken strange new appetites in her and even leave her seemingly – impossibly – pregnant. Equal parts inventive, funny and compulsive, Carrying mixes the sensational body horror of The Substance with the transgressive camp comedy of John Waters in a style that’s all its own, and announces the arrival of a thrilling new talent in fiction.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~the freaky ick is only the fig leaf over the real horror
~more layers than an onion
~the Horrors Of WomanhoodTM via a trans perspective
~the opposite of pregnancy body-horror
~horror as 4D chess
This is one of those genius horror novels where the horror is not what you think it is. The big obvious freaky/gross stuff is not the nightmarish part, for all that it is still very freaky and gross. Carrying manages to be incisive social commentary and cathartic wish-fulfilment and ironic satire and a great big metaphor all at once, while still being compulsively readable. I ate this up like popcorn and I suspect everyone else drawn to it will as well!
Also, because we’ve had several ghosty/demonic pregnancy novels lately and that made me make assumptions – this is not supernatural horror. Which in retrospect I think was a very good thing, but as a reader I was kind of disappointed, because my preference is definitely for supernatural horror.
But Carrying is so addictively moreish, and so freaking clever, that even I could tell that it’s excellent! I hope it’s clear how much of a compliment that is.
So: Martha is a trans woman, one who passes flawlessly as a cis woman. (If you’re new here, ‘cis’ is the term for everyone who is not any flavour of trans or nonbinary.) Only one person in the world knows that she’s trans, and only because he knew Martha pre-transition. Nobody else has a clue, which is exactly how Martha likes it. As the book opens, Martha is in the process of faking a miscarriage, as part of her long-term plan to get her husband Leon to accept that they can’t have biological children, without the need to come out to him as trans. But as the book description says, she soon becomes life-changingly ill, and after the deeply gross, freaky ‘treatments’, discovers that she’s pregnant for real. Thankfully the one friend who knows she’s trans is also qualified to play doctor to her pregnancy, which means Martha gets to have everything she wanted – she can be pregnant and give birth, by some miracle, and get through it all without having to out herself to anyone new. Win/win!
Superficially, the horror in Carrying comes from the treatments for Martha’s mysterious chronic illness: the only thing that vanishes her symptoms and leaves her feeling good and healthy again…is eating rancid meat. The longer the book goes on, the more extreme the treatments get, levelling up in grossness and taboo-ness. This is the obvious source of ick, the thing that makes us reflexively flinch and sets our skin crawling. But only the shallowest possible read could leave anyone thinking that that is where the real horror is, what the real horror is.
From their ballroom foremothers: To carry is to do something with so much drama, so much flair, so exceptionally well as to utterly annihilate the competition, even to the point of going overboard, of doing too much, of being extra extra. She is carrying to the highest degree.
Carrying is a book about being trans: specifically, about being a trans woman. It’s suffused with the history of trans culture in the USA – for example, the ‘ballroom foremothers’ of the quote above refers to ball culture, which is so foundational to modern trans and queer culture that I can’t get into it without completely derailing this review (if you want to learn more about it, I strongly recommend the tv show Pose). The title itself comes from trans slang, and other examples abound (though readers who aren’t familiar with terms like ‘tea’ and ‘fish’ don’t need to worry, because the meaning is always explained or clear from context). And a big, vital part of the book is…what it took Martha, what it cost her, to get where she is now.
When I was reading Carrying, I was confused at first by how easily Martha took to things like eating rotten meat. It rang false to me, seemed unrealistic, unbelievable. But Josephs quickly made me understand: the things Martha has to do in this book to treat her illness?
Are NOTHING compared to what she’s already done to have the body she needs.
It’s not preachy, and it’s not info-dumped on us, but Josephs lays out very starkly how much physical and psychological pain Martha went through in order to transition. The various surgeries were the least of it. So eating rotten meat (and everything else her illness goes on to demand)? Is NOTHING. Is EASY. Especially since her illness makes the meat etc taste and feel good, like she’s giving her body exactly what it needs. This doesn’t even hurt! Of course it’s fairly straightforward for her. Having to hide meat around the house so it’ll rot, sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to get her dose, is nothing to bat an eye at, not after dilating religiously with medical dildos after her vaginoplasty surgery.
That realisation was a galaxy-brain moment for me. I reeled.
This is the madness of transsexuality: The physical pain of changing is less than the psychological pain of staying the same.
For me, this was the main source of the horror: that it’s this hard, and this painful, to be a trans woman who wants to pass. (Not all do; people’s relationships to their gender identity are as many and varied as are people themselves. But that’s another discussion entirely.) That all of this is demanded by the rest of the world – because none of it would be necessary if our ideas of what a woman is meant to look like reflected reality instead of…whatever weird societal hallucination we’re all living in. If no one batted an eye at a woman with facial hair, if we all viscerally, reflexively understood and believed that a woman with a beard is still a woman, if we didn’t look at people and reflexively assign them a gender – then probably it would not be necessary for someone like Martha to go through the throat-slitting agony of anaesthetised facial electrolysis.
She’d tilt her head back for the electrologist and almost wish the lady would slit her throat instead, end all the pain.
But there is plenty else to be terrified of in this book! Robert, Martha’s friend and doctor, does his best to lay out all the ways she and/or her baby could die or be maimed – all the dangers that are on the table for a perfectly cis pregnancy – in order to scare her into having an abortion. As a chronically ill disabled person, Martha’s sudden, unnameable illness almost gave me flashbacks; the horror of something going abruptly, irreparably, inexplicably wrong with your body is one Josephs conveys viscerally, complete with Martha’s helplessness as she watches her genuinely happy life crumble around her (and I could write an entire thesis on how good a metaphor chronic illness is for body dysphoria! One I’d argue is only reinforced by the number of other trans people in the support group Martha finally stumbles across…) And don’t even get me STARTED on the husband, and his reaction when he decides the foetus is in danger from Martha! (Which his mother backs to the hilt, which is arguably even more horrifying than what he does, insert the myth of female solidarity here, please!) That Martha, in ‘becoming’ a ‘real’ woman via her pregnancy, is reduced to a breeder/incubator, her personhood stripped away, which is exactly what happens to so many cis women…making a good part of the horror femininity/womanhood itself…
And it wasn’t until I finished reading that I realised/remembered that Martha herself is what makes this a horror novel for some people. A stealth trans woman is the nightmare of TERFs and conservatives everywhere. That adds…another level entirely to every page, one that makes me even more impressed with what Josephs has done here. I don’t know how to even START dissecting that!
Just, the LAYERS of irony/commentary/HORROR in this book!!!!!!!!!! It’s genius, awe-full in the most awful way, and thanks I hate how all of it is EXTREMELY VALID AND CORRECT, but that’s also why I think Carrying is a masterpiece, so.
One thing that I loved on a very personal level was – the way Josephs approaches whether a trans person is morally obligated to inform partners, or potential partners, that they are trans. The fear that Leon will discover that Martha is trans is a thick rope of tension running through the whole book, a question that Martha herself wrestles with constantly, not helped by the judgement and pressure applied by those who know Martha’s keeping it secret from him. The scene where another trans woman validates Martha’s choice to keep it to herself, and rips apart the idea that she has any obligation to inform anybody, is both incredibly powerful and my favourite in the whole book. Even liberals, even liberal queers, usually take it for granted that trans people are supposed to do this – to tell people that they are trans – and I’ve never understood it, and to see it vehemently rejected in a piece of traditionally-published fiction made me want to fucking CHEER. For that scene alone, I would love this book so much.
Seriously, Martha is not the only one ‘carrying’; so is Samantha Jones. ‘to do something with so much drama, so much flair, so exceptionally well as to utterly annihilate the competition’? LITERALLY THIS BOOK.
Some readers are not going to pick up Carrying to begin with, because they’re cowards or bigots. But I think readers who don’t know much about trans women, who have questions but no hate, will get a lot out of this – Martha and her story will be eye-opening for them in a lot of ways. And for everyone else, this is ‘simply’ a spectacularly clever piece of horror fiction that had me utterly gagged, a book for everyone who loves their horror complex and meaty and giving a middle-finger to the pearl-clutchers. It’s going straight (hah!) onto my Best of Year list. I think Josephs is a genius, someone who is going right to the top of my authors-to-watch spreadsheet.
And she should definitely be on yours too!
Leave a Reply