The Blood Year Daughter

by G.G. Silverman

In G.G. Silverman’s debut fairytale-horror collection The Blood Year Daughter, a woman builds husbands out of gravel and slaughterhouse feathers, two sisters eat cinnamon-scented pieces of their mother, and a charming doctor’s murdered brides whisper warnings to his newest wife.

Silverman’s women and girls escape smiling captors, draw blood to curse their loved ones, and wield fear to defend themselves in post-apocalyptic worlds. They ignore the insults of rotting Elderwomen filled with flies, resist marriage proposals, and fill themselves—joyfully—with multitudes of snakes. They are murdered and choose to live again.

Drawing from folktales, Silverman’s Italian roots, and killers both real and imagined, The Blood Year Daughter’s stories recall Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado. Spare and glittering as a spiderweb, sharp as a needle through a husband’s nose, they establish G.G. Silverman as a formidable voice in feminist horror and magical realism.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fantasy, Adult, Fiction, Anthologies

222 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

G.G. Silverman is a first-generation Italian-American writer. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Fiction, and the O. Henry Prize, and has been adapted for short film with a Hollywood debut. Her work has also appeared in Bram Stoker Award-nominated Women in Horror anthologies, and has been a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Writers Grant, as well as the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for feminist writing. The Blood Year Daughter, a finalist for numerous awards, is her debut short story collection.

Reviews

[aja]

idk how else to describe this besides fake weird girl drivel. like the author knew modern horror (especially modern feminist horror) was being written in a certain way & was like, okay, well, i guess i have to try that too? i would prbly have been able to just keep plodding through this -- much like the vast majority of el-mohtar's short story collection this had some cool ideas, i was just bored by the delivery -- except i reached a point in one story where the POV character interrupted her own narrative to say, and this is a direct quote, "had we been lied to our whole lives? had we been told of monsters past the borders as a means of control?" and then in the next story we get "i'm a woman now, and i make my own choices. i know what's best for my life, yet there are those who'd have me live it their way" like damn just tell me you think i'm stupid. sharing this tumblr post again here for no particular reason

long story short every piece of this collection i read felt like a deflating water balloon we'd slapped some scotch tape over. like a story about a woman who keeps making new husbands for herself out of slaughterhouse feathers or stones from a river bed should have been a slam dunk for me. come on now. we just never seemed to want to actually sit with our stories, or give them real meat to digest. and then she couldn't even do us the service of trusting us to actually understand the story without the characters turning to look directly into the camera to tell us the themes of them. genuinely insulting

[Mariah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairy tale anthology that bites. Come here to read women’s wrongs and find catharsis through the horrors of it all. The anthology starts off strong with the story that bears the anthology’s title. It is eerie and passionate. A bloody fun time through twelve stories that really challenge the way you think of the social constructs around us. An anthology for the wicked girls and us weirdoes eating lunch by ourselves.
From ghosts, to monsters, and to the horrors of our mind – you are bound to find a story that resonates with your soul. Even the stories that may not connect with - you still have a way of bearing a powerful message. There is something enchanting about the way the author switches stories between different perspectives. Four stars because some stories were a bit slow moving for my personal taste. Yet, still a fun reading adventure.
This is an anthology that screams the author is enthusiastic about writing and creating a narrative that invoked their soul. Absolutely loved reading the stories to really understand the psyche. I found many of these stories speak on the metaphor of being consumed by social expectations. This expands to mothering roles as women and how that becomes our one expectation. Each story is a spin on how social constructs are chipping away at our very beings. All opinions are my own.

For tarot readings, recommendations, and reviews, visit my blog, brujerialibrary.wordpress.com

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - LOVED some others just okay

[Candice Vandenburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Blood Year Daughter
Available now!

I think I say it every time, but I LOVE SHORT STORIES!!

Handled by a talented author, a whole world can be rolled into 20ish pages.

GG Silverman delivers in spades. It’s like taking a walk through her dreams… or rather nightmares. Disturbingly tender, it is chock-full of women and girls going through it.

My favorite stories (if I have to pick) would be Unbecoming, Namesake Day, and All Hail the Boy King.

Pick this one up if you love feminist horror that is full of folk horror and magical realism.

I’d like to thank GG Silverman for this ARC.

[Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Creature Publishing for the eARC - all opinions are my own.

The Blood Year Daughter is a collection of empowering stories with a central motif: The Divine Feminine. Using magical realism and fantastically dark imagery, G.G. Silverman spins fairytales that serve to both enchant and enrage.

It’s difficult for me to narrow my favorites down but the stories that had the largest impacts on me were: The Blood Year Daughter, Four Husbands, Fold, and One Night On A Lonely Road. I can say with sincerity that there wasn’t a single story that failed to meet my expectations, though.

G.G. Silverman writes the feminine experience with a sort of rawness that’s at once unexpected and invigorating. There’s truths in these pages that are universal and yet we are told to contain them, to carry them alone, to dull our truths. Not only are these stories validating to the feminine experience, but they center themes like motherhood, matriarchy, autonomy, sisterhood, friendship, resilience, etc.

There’s certainly body horror and graphic imagery but the scenes are purposeful and generally empowering. The author builds the reader’s rage meticulously but, more importantly, allows for purgative release. Reading this collection was cathartic and I’m anxiously awaiting the author’s next work.

I recommend for fans of thought-provoking stories, dark whimsy, and feminist horror.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

🩸 The Blood Year Daughter by G.G. Silverman 🩸

A special thank you to @creaturepublishing for the #gifted e-arc of The Blood Year Daughter.

Silverman’s The Blood Year Daughter is a powerful collection diving into dark fantasy with all the stories centering around the feminine experience. With body horror and magical realism, the stories will stick with you long after you finish the last page.

Some of my favorites in this collection were First and The Four Husbands.

Be sure to pick this one up this Tuesday, April 28th! You don’t want to miss it!

Get it here 👉🏻 https://bookshop.org/a/79577/97819519...

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twelve Fairy Tales in which the Wedding Is Not the Happy Ending
BWAF RECOMMENDED READ
BWAF Score: 7/10

TL;DR: Twelve fairy tales sharpened to a point. Silverman’s debut works through image rather than plot: mothers folded into chairs, husbands stitched into shrouds, daughters reborn as snakes, sisters howling in antler masks, fishing villages swallowed by mist. The prose is spare and physical. The violence is precise. The strongest pieces do not leave the skull.

The Blood Year Daughter is the debut story collection of G.G. Silverman, twelve stories long, published by Creature Publishing of Charlottesville. The cover is a photograph of a bridal gown, taken by the author. The book contains, in this order: a peasant girl who pricks her finger and bleeds onto her sister’s wedding dress; a chorus of dead wives narrating the dispatch of their husband; a woman who builds men out of feathers, gravel, parachute silk, and silkworms; a cult of girls trained from birth to run; a fishing village swallowed by mist; teenagers staging the martyrdoms of the saints; a post-apocalyptic forest commune of girls in antler masks; a cottage of dead daughters who do not yet know they are dead; an assault survivor reborn as snakes; a wolf-girl raised in the Pacific Northwest; two sisters consuming their mother in installments; and a murdered first-place winner reincarnated in another woman’s body.

The accumulation rocks. So does the framing. (Silverman’s roots are Italian, and the first three stories sound dictated under a low-burning candle in some hill town the cartographers forgot.) The animating principle is fairy tale logic applied to specifically female endings: not what happens at the wedding, but what happens after. Or before. Or instead.

The marketing copy invokes Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link. The closer kin is Angela Carter (the violence) and Link (the structural drift). The sentences are short. The verbs are physical. The prose works mostly through image, and the images are mostly bodies: mothers’ bodies, daughters’ bodies, ghosts’ bodies, the bodies of men whose throats are about to be opened. When Silverman steps outside the fairy tale register, as in “Namesake Day,” a satirical piece set in a town where teenagers stage their own torture for an annual competition, the voice goes contemporary in a way that took me out of it. That story is funny and it is also the one piece in the book where the prose is visibly doing less than it does elsewhere.

“Fold,” about two daughters who eat their mother in pieces, is the best thing here. The mother bends herself into a chair. She becomes a bed. She lets her daughters dig into her belly with one finger and then a second finger and then their teeth. The story builds by addition (clothes made of the mother’s hair, eyes the daughters carry to school in their pockets, custard scooped from the mother’s torso). It accumulates a tenderness that should not be possible in a story whose subject is consumption. It is also short. It does not explain itself. It does not announce its intentions. Whatever it is doing about motherhood as resource, motherhood as edible, motherhood as the price of survival, it does that work without instructing the reader what the work is.

“We, the Ghosts” runs second. A doctor in some unspecified Italian past examines a feverish young woman, marries her, takes her blood in vials. The collective first-person narration belongs to his earlier wives. The voice is plural and patient. The story turns on an act of needlework, and that turn, executed in two short paragraphs with no commentary, is the most precise piece of horror writing in the book.

Other things land. “Forgotten Girls” is a quiet ghost story whose central revelation arrives early enough that the prose is forced to live inside it rather than build toward it, and it does. “Unbecoming,” about a cult of girls trained from birth to run, has perhaps the strongest single image in the collection, a wooden mask sewn into a girl’s hair so that pulling it off would flay her. “All Hail the Boy King,” the most plot-driven piece, achieves its bleakness through pacing rather than image, and is the story closest in shape to a conventional horror tale.

The collection’s signature move, repeated across nearly every story, is transformation as resolution: a woman becomes a fox, becomes snakes, becomes a ghost, becomes a baby, becomes a mother, becomes a wife who sews her husband shut. The repetition is not a flaw exactly. It is the book’s argument. (The argument being that the available exits are mostly mythological. The argument being that the realistic ones have been tried.) But once that argument has been made twice, by the fourth and fifth iteration it begins to register as a guarantee, and the guarantee mutes some of the suspense. You know, by then, that the protagonist will get out, take revenge, or cross a threshold into another body. You stop wondering if. You start wondering how.

The closing story, “And the First Shall Go Last,” is the longest, the most ambitious, and arguably the most uneven. Told in second person, future tense, it tracks a child spelling-bee champion alongside the man preparing to kill her. The prose works hardest here, and where it strains it strains visibly. The killer’s interiority is the weakest writing in the book. He is rendered the way a literary writer who has never been to a true-crime convention imagines such a man to be rendered, which is to say with too much abjection and not enough mundanity. But the structural conceit (the future tense doing the work that fate does in a Greek tragedy, what is going to happen and you cannot stop it) is something Silverman has not tried in any earlier story, and it is doing what it sets out to do.

A note on the author. Silverman is first-generation Italian-American, based north of Seattle, where she also keeps a working studio as a visual artist (paper sculpture, fine art photography, botanical drawing). Her short fiction has been a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Writers Grant and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, and the manuscript that became this book was a finalist or semifinalist for several short-collection prizes (the Santa Fe Writers Project, Dzanc, the OSU Non/Fiction Collection Prize) before Creature picked it up. The acknowledgments thank, by name, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Hempel, Ted Chiang, Alexander Weinstein, and Ramona Ausubel; pieces from this book were workshopped with each. (The acknowledgments are unusually candid about this.) Silverman has earlier published a YA zombie comedy. The Blood Year Daughter is her first work of literary fiction, and the seriousness of its assembly shows in the prose and occasionally, faintly, in the feeling of reading something workshopped almost to translucency.

The book is not a masterpiece. It is consistent in a way that few debut collections are, and consistency at this register is its own kind of accomplishment. There are at least three stories you will think about a week later. There are no stories you will be sorry you read.

Whether the mythic vocabulary holds for you depends on whether you find the women-into-foxes-into-snakes-into-mothers economy a useful one. If you do, this is twelve variations on a theme you already love. If you do not, it is at least an occasion to reconsider whether the realistic registers you prefer have been doing the work you think they have been doing.

The cover is a bridal gown.

[SpinelessBookReviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing debut collection of short stories ranging from gothic to supernatural to post apocalyptic. Each one centered around the all too real horrors that women face every day.

Everything in this book was so hauntingly eerie and beautifully bizarre. The world Silverman created was like an off-kilter fairy tale full of tangible monsters and threats that give each fable its own dense gravity. Some of my favorites from this book were We The Ghosts, All Hail the Boy King , and And the First Shall Go Last, but absolutely none of the stories in this book fell flat.

This is a collection that will stick with me for a very long time. You can tell from her tender attention to detail that GG Silverman is clearly a master of short fiction. She gets so much feeling packed into each story in such a short amount of time

[Mary Usufzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic anthology of feminist horror stories (very reminiscent of many fairy tales!).

Each story has a specific message, but there are overarching tropes about surviving abuse, family trauma, and coming of age of young girls. In one story, we see ghosts trapped in a lighthouse until someone discovers the truth about their deaths. In another one, we see how a mother's sacrifice (physically and emotionally) brought about the cycle of their daughters potentially doing the same thing when they have kids. In another (really similar to King Lear), three young girls pretend to be witches to get a boy king overthrown. The final story was probably the most haunting one. After a girl dies at a young age at the hands of an evil man, she's able to be reincarnated into another life for a second chance.

The author's prose is absolutely beautiful. Her use of second person narration is brilliant and genius. If you're a woman, I implore you to read every single one of these. No matter if you've been through these similar experiences, every story will resonate in your heart.

Overall, a fantastic collection of short stories.

[Jalyn Fiske · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silverman's short story collection, The Blood Year Daughter, is steeped in beauty and in violence. Her exquisite prose is sensual and striking against the backdrop of her book's dark, horrific, and haunting themes. A stand-out story for me is "We, the Ghosts" a feminist retelling of the bloody Bluebeard fairy tale--one of my very favorites--that starts off familiar then veers off into the freaky and fantastical. Some others are "Four Husbands" and "Fold" that ring of the Brothers Grimm yet tread much darker and more delicious. In another writer's hands, this collection could easily contain tragedies, but Silverman elevates her stories into evocative and empowering tales of women who suffer but who are strong, who delve into the deep magic and face life's darkness head-on. That's my kind of fairy tale. I will be re-reading these again and again.

[Lauren Book Witch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of twelve grim fairy tale-esque stories about girls and women, their bodies, their desires, their fears and their secrets. In the titular story, “The Blood Year Daughter,” a girl born in a Blood Milk Year is wild and refuses societies expectations. She envies the love her mother gives to her sister who was born in a White Milk Year. In a Maritime themed story, “Forgotten Girls,” spirits languish on an unnamed island, in the attic of a lighthouse keepers cottage, smelling briny rot and waiting for the next girl to disposed at their feet. All of these stories move and shift with heady fumes of blood earth and rot. A brilliant collection, like an updated, feral rage fueled answer to the Brothers Grim.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Blood Year Daughter is my kind of fairytale - it's dark, delicious and filled with haunting themes.

Silverman bring us a collection of feminist fairytales inspired by Italian folklore.

G.G. Silverman writes with an unique rawness that bleeds over the pages and into your soul - I will definitely return to this collection again and I hope to see more of Silverman's writing in the future.

Thanks to Edelweiss+ and Creature Publishing for the DRC.

[Shen Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has ever felt they do not fit neatly into the shape society expects - too much, too strange, too sensitive, too unwilling to become what others demand-this is the book for us. It understands the loneliness of being misread, but also the power of refusing to be reduced. Its women are not simply victims, monsters, brides, daughters, or cautionary tales. They are complicated, wounded, defiant, and alive. This is some of the best fiction I’ve read in years. Highly recommend.

[Tara Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection transports readers into the collective unconscious of fairy tales, drawing upon Italian folk tales with settings in dark forests, haunted palaces, doomed villages. It taps into familiar themes but puts a new spin on them, like the mother who literally gives every inch of herself to her children. An eerie and satisfying read!

[Jen Self · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! This collection might be my favorite read of the year so far! These stories are feminist fairytales inspired by Italian folklore. They are dark, thought-provoking and will stick with you long after the last page is read! I'm looking forward to seeing more from this amazing author!

[emme✿☺︎✌︎⋆˚꩜｡.☘︎ ݁˖!! · Rating 3 out of 5]

A chilling feminist collection of short stories touching on body horror, magical realism, and gender based violence. Silverman's stories will burrow deep under your skin and haunt your very soul.

[Chelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tore through this book in 24 hours, loving every sentence. I'm a fan of beautifully written horror, and this collection fit the bill.

[Breadini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection contains a dozen tales which range from modern-day horror stories to timeless fairy tales and even some very blunt metaphorical folk tales, all centered largely on women, memory, violence, grief, transformation, and survival. The strongest stories combine striking concepts with enough space to fully explore them, while the weaker entries often feel more like scenes or thought experiments than complete narratives.

My favorite stories were "Namesake Day," "We, the Ghosts," and "And the First Shall Go Last." These stories gave their characters room to live, suffer, change, and confront the consequences of their worlds. "Four Husbands" and "Fold" also stood out, using grotesque imagery to explore their individual themes through metaphysical body horror dripping with meaning.

The collection repeatedly returns to themes of women being harmed, forgotten, consumed, transformed, or forced to survive within oppressive systems. Sometimes these themes landed powerfully, but other times the stories ended just as the most interesting questions were beginning. The stories that didn't land for me often felt as though not enough thought had been put into the characters themselves, focusing too heavily on the ideas they were meant to represent. As a result, some characters felt hollow, while others acted in ways that seemed to contradict the very themes the stories were trying to explore.

I appreciated the author's imagination, willingness to embrace the grotesque, and talent for creating memorable images. While the collection was uneven for me, its strongest stories were compelling enough that I would be interested in reading more of the author's work.

Thank you to the publisher and Goodreads for providing me with an advance review copy. All opinions are my own.

Overall Rating: 3.75/5

Individual Story Ratings:

The Blood Year Daughter — 2/5
We, the Ghosts — 4/5
Four Husbands — 3.5/5
The Unbecoming — 3/5
The Gray — 3/5
Namesake Day — 4.5/5
All Hail the Boy King — 3/5
Forgotten Girls — 3/5
Justisss — 2/5
One Night on a Lonely Road — 1/5
Fold — 3.5/5
And the First Shall Go Last — 4.5/5