Story Study: “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest”

Last week I was invited by fellow author J.W. Donley to a challenge to read and dissect one short story from Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume I. If you’ve read my blog before, you know I love a good dissection, so I happily jumped on board! 

The collection starts off with Rebecca Campbell’s “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest,” winner of the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020. The story was originally printed in Issue 05/06  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2019. You can find that issue on Amazon here (free to read for Kindle Unlimited subscribers) or purchase the Year’s Best collection yourself here! 

I highly suggest reading the story and following along because there are spoilers here!

“The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” is a weird horror story about a new mom who’s haunted by a shadowy figure when she returns home with her husband and newborn baby. The story opens in the hospital with the protagonist listening to another woman screaming in the maternity ward while the protagonist herself is giving birth. 

When the protagonist arrives home, Campbell structures the story around a mystery—namely, the identity of the person who remains upstairs with the protagonist’s husband. She writes, “Upstairs, Greg was working. She could hear the creak as the two of them paced [...] sometimes she heard them come down the stairs.” (14) But Campbell was careful to include that the baby was in the protagonist’s arms at this time. There’s a tension insinuated into this mystery as well—is the reader to believe there’s truly an unknown person upstairs with her husband or is she unreliable?

About half-way through, it’s revealed the protagonist is experiencing postpartum psychosis when a nurse informs her that this third person is a hallucination. For anyone familiar with the mental illness, both the protagonist and her baby’s safety are implicated. Campbell plays on this implication, having the protagonist experience exceedingly dangerous hallucinations while continuing to hide her symptoms from her husband. 

Between the surreal and, at times, mystifying language and scenes, the narrator’s clear unreliability, and the reader’s need to know that the baby is okay, the last pages of this story keep the reader on the edge of their seat. 

Campbell circles back to the opening when it’s revealed that the mysterious person upstairs first visited her in the hospital when she received her epidural. I love that the connection isn’t immediately drawn, but left for the reader to ponder: was the woman screaming in the hospital in fact this shadow side of the protagonist? (And those final lines? *Chef’s kiss.*)

My favorite aspect of this story was Campbell’s stunning prose. There were so many images that were so richly described, one of my favorites: “While they sat, the sky darkened but for the strip of dandelion yellow in the west, and between the sunset and the streetlights, there came the brief hour of fireflies darting in and out of green-gold luminescence.” (16) I also thought the interruption of narration with internal dialogue was a powerful invocation of the confusion and the detachment from reality that some PPD patients experience. 

I wondered if my enjoyment of this story was influenced by my personal experiences with PPD and the hardship of that proverbial fourth trimester. The feeling of being removed from the rest of the world really resonated for me. Have you read it? What did you think? Let me know in the comments and go check out Joe’s blog on the same article here!

If you liked Campbell’s story, you can find her on Twitter here!