This was incredible. I love dystopian fiction but I feel like there are so repetitive now. However, this was intriguing and unique. I couldn’t put to down because I was absorbed the writing and what was going to happen next. I absolutely loved the character development and I was invested in their lives. Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for a chance to read and review this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Okay so the premise for this was interesting, if a bit extreme: toxins from a new species of moth basically kill off all the men in the world, leading to a total overhaul of society, one in which women are now the decision-makers. Any men that remain are strictly confined to group care homes in order to protect them from certain death. The protagonist is Mary, an older worker in one such care home who is one of the few women old enough to remember what life was like before.

Some of this book was really interesting to think about- like how much more peaceful society might actually be if women ran everything, or how relationships and sexuality would evolve if there are no men available to have relationships with, and how easily such a new society would relinquish its newfound power if the opportunity to give men immunity to the toxin became available.

That said, there were a lot of sark things in this book as well, from how sexual reproduction would be handled to how quickly men became dehumanized. Some of this left me with an ehhh feeling, like it seemed a bit of a stretch to assume that things could get so extremely sexist, but when you reverse it and think of our own society, there is so much of this stuff that happens already and we don't even notice it. I think the author wanted to kind of shock you and make you think about sexism in society by offering up this extreme role reversal scenario.

For those wondering, the toxin attacked specifically biological men, and the author did mention that intersex individuals were affected differently, depending on the person. There is a trans* woman character, and she became infected, however. I will go ahead and spoil that because it could be a triggering thing, but at least the author didn't have characters misgender her and the protagonist tried in vain to get her access to hormones after the world essentially ended. I am unsure all in all how I feel about how that was handled, though.

Anyway, it was written with a bit of a thriller style, and there is quite some violence in this book, so if you don't like that then steer clear. If you are not a fan of time jumps, then you won't enjoy this either- most of the story goes back and forth from just before/during the pandemic to about 50 years later in the present day of the novel. I love time jumps however, and found them to be integrated well and really help tell the story.

Thank you so much Angry robot for this opportunity to read Moths!

Moths is most certainly not normally the type of book i would choose to read. However i did find it to be a very intriguing and compelling. I can not wait for the sequel

My review is linked below. Thanks for the opportunity and I wish the best for Hennigan! She'll face all kinds of unnecessary criticism as an initially self-published author.

I tried, I really did! The writing here is incredible, so evocative and raw. The setting is beyond terrifying. As a woman with a husband and much-loved male friends... it hit me so hard.

I can't finish it though. I have to keep putting it down, perhaps because of the 2020 memories that are still so close (my partner is a Paramedic and I'm a celebrant who had to conduct funerals during that difficult time).

I may well return. But for now, I just can't. I have already been recommending, though - to those who I think can stomach it! Huge thanks to the author for re-sharing, and best wishes for the upcoming sequel.

Moths is a speculative dystopia that takes us on a journey primarily through the eyes of Mary, a woman in her 70s, 40 years after a species of moth was uncovered that changed the world. Their threads are toxic to men, either killing them or turning them violent and mad.

I was utterly gripped by this book and was so happy to recieve an eARC for it. Our main protagonist Mary is insightful, intelligent, and has a truly human moral compass. Hennigan's look at a female-run society is profound and thought-provoking, and the way that the men saved in the institutes are treated is both shocking and stays with you for a long, long time.

The world order, gender roles, humanisation, and the integrity of people living through the threat to 50% of the population are the questions posed to Mary and to the reader, and honestly Moths was such an incredible joy to read.

Although Moths works well as a standalone, I am beyond excited to revisit Hennigan's fantastic worldbuilding and writing in TOXXIC, which comes out next year! It is definitely my most anticipated 2024 title.

Oh my gosh.... I LOVED this book! Being a HUGE fan of The Handmaid's Tale and Vox this book was perfect for me. It had everything that I love about Dystopian.... a virus type outbreak, mass death, a restructuring of society, an oppressed part of society, and someone willing to stand up to the new government.
The characters were fantastic and I developed strong love/hate feelings for them and the storyline was just amazing. Mary isn't your typical rebel but she developed so well and her back story made her rebellion so believable, she just became a character that I was rooting for to the very end.
The gruesome and nightmarish scenes dotted through the flashbacks were done fantastically and really added to how disturbing the whole book is.
I NEED to read the next book and find out what happens next

Not normally the type of read I would choose. Out of my comfort zone however I found it an intriguing and great read. I read it through very quickly.

It has been a while since I've delved into dystopian literature and I'm glad this was my first dip into that pool. This book was equally disturbing and mesmerising. I loved every page and devoured this very quickly. After going through the pandemic (like everyone of course) it was disturbing to read about the possibilities of what "could have been" after a catastrophic event.

I loved the use of flashbacks and that the protagonist was an older woman (not often seen in dystopian reads) and that the cause is such a simple thing that we see every day. It really shows how much can change from just one simple thing going wrong.

I won't comment too deeply on the ins and outs of the book as I don't wish to spoil for others. But there are specific scenes that I am still thinking about (hospital anyone?) To the point I've gone back to reread that specific part just to try and get the replay out of my head!

Really good book. Have recommended to my book club. Thank you for releasing the ARC to me!

Moths by Jane Hennigan


🧬 Moths by Jane Hennigan
🧬 Cover art by Kieryn Tyler
🧬 Published by Angry Robot Books
🧬 Release Date March 14 2023

🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬/5



‘Where were you when it started?’

‘These stories, the ones that those who weren’t there won’t understand, we hold them; we hoard them; we allow ourselves to look at them only a piece at a time’.

‘But beneath the weariness, I felt a warmth I hadn’t felt in years. The comfort of sharing pain.’

‘…he scanned the echoes of the world long dead.’

‘That may be the first time I noticed it, the plural pronoun - them, they, that group noun of the bothered that was ti become part of the language for men’.

‘In a recession, cash is king; in an apocalypse, it’s clean water and canned stew’.



🧬 I ate this one up. Finished in two days and when I saw there is a sequel I beamed!

🧬 Moths by Jane Hennigan is a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic novel, taking place 43 years after a moth species started attacking men giving them SANS (severe acute neurological syndrome). Some turned blue and were suffocating in their sleep, and others became delusional and turned incredibly aggressive. For 43 years the world, or the UK (where this story is probably taking place), has lived without men. It has been so long that the new generations do not even know how men were incorporated into society before this terrible event. Vaccines and cures have not been successful.

🧬 We follow Mary, a 60+-year-old woman working as a carer in one of the facilities where they are taking care of non-infected men who are basically living as prisoners and in confinement cause even the most minor exposure to this moth will be deadly to them.

🧬 The rest of the plot is for you to discover and piece it all together as that was what was exciting to do while reading this book.

What I loved:

- The fact that our protagonist is older than what we are normally used to. We need more representation of older people, please!
- The pacing and jumping timelines seeing Mary’s past and present as well as her coworker Olivia which gives us glimpses of the world before but also we understand the characters knowing their backstory and what they have endured all those years.
- Character development
- Twists and ‘oh’ moments
- Seeing how the world is ruled by women, and how the author thought of realistic issues that would have come had it been reality like the fact that we have too few women mechanics etc and how they had to deal with learning by the few remaining plus educate themselves in repurposing as a vital way of surviving as to not reinvent the wheel so to speak. The three new pillars of this society? ‘Sorority, maternity and thrift’.
- The writing! Wow, I could not tell this was a debut novel. I did not miss a single word I was so hooked but also I annotated quite a few passages because of the beautiful imagery and/or metaphors Hennigan was weaving together.


🧬 All in all, this a story will not forget and will be keeping an eye out for the sequel called ‘Toxxic’. A massive thank you to Angry Robot Books for sending me a copy of this one in exchange for an honest review. To date, I have never been disappointed by your published books, and I have read quite a bunch so far!

🧬 Fun fact: this one was originally self-published and picked up by the lovely people over at Angry Robot Books. Edited by Eleanor Teasdale and Alice Abrams.



🧬 PS: I immediately subscribed to the author’s newsletter after I read the last word on page.

#moths
#postapocalyptic
#angryrobotbooks
#5starbookreview
#5starbook
#spoonfulofhygge_
#bookreview

Humanity is balanced on a razor-thin knife edge.

We may not always, or often, think so as we rush from train to work to lunch to evening function and on and on, but the reality is that whether its climate change, pandemics, war, water shortages or energy scarcity, we have a lot piling up on the negative side of the scale.

Just how precarious our place on the evolutionary ladder is becomes chillingly clear in Jane Hennigan’s Moths, a grippingly thoughtful novel which explores what happens when a species of moths, driven from its Amazonian habitat and attendant predators by land clearing, finds its way into the heart of global civilisation.

Up close and personal with humanity in a way it simply hasn’t been before, the moth sets off a global cataclysm when the gossamer-thin strands of its caterpillars waft around the world, either killing all men outright in their sleep or transforming them into rage-fuelled murderers.

In an almost-instant, civilisation teeters and falls, its rebuilding down to the only functional surviving gender women who possess an immune system robustly able to fend of the infection long before it does to them what it did to men.

Forty years after the patriarchy falls in a brutalist wave of death and violence, society has reformed around women who run everything by necessity, with the surviving men, and those born after the collapse, locked away in institutions where they are treated as second-class citizens, not worthy of education (though that approach depends on the degree of liberal leaning by the facility’s administrator) or advancement, their only real worth lying in their ability to sire new offspring which they do through a tourist-like series of visitations, led by women curious to see what men are actually like.

With pitch-perfect worldbuilding which boldly imagines society a homo-normative solely in the hands of women who may be prone to the power hungry sins of men but to nothing like to the extent of the previous testosterone-fuelled regime, and an eye on the many broken elements of our male top-heavy world, Moths is a brilliant dystopian ride through a plausibly possible future.

Key to its great, immersive appeal lies in the fact that while it provides plenty of page-turning action, intrigue and conspiracy, it is an innately thoughtful piece of storytelling.

It asks us to be honest about the great many failings of the current world, and how these might be solved by the sudden disappearance of men from the centre of public discourse and management.

While that might seem like a simplistic premise – that everything would be better with men out of the equation – Hennigan’s novel is anything but, diving deep into emotional and moral complexity, all too aware that something as complicated as the world we live in cannot be fixed by simply removing something.

Time and again it asks whether what has been added, or rather formed in the absence of one half of humanity (though clearly the percentage has tipped massively in favour of women), is a good thing and whether society is better off without the oppressive patriarchy that once dominated it.

Much of Moths centres on the person of Mary, a woman from the time before, who has made an accommodation with life as it is now but who still mourns the loss of her husband Adrian to an eternal sleep and to her 14-year-old son Ryan to murderous rage.

With flashbacks to life at the start of the world-changing pandemic sitting illuminatingly alongside the present day narrative moments, where the supposed idealism of current societal structures is being challenged in a number of key ways, Moths is a cleverly insightful story that neatly balances rumination and action to a wholly beguiling degree.

Much of the action within its pages is of the more meditative kind, proof that you can have a full speed ahead story that doesn’t need to be all octane and tension-filled moments and which isn’t necessarily slowed down by recollection of time gone by.

Much of Mary’s experience is drawn upon to push the story along, with the novel’s main character caught in significant ways between the past and present, with meaningful musing on how the two might come together to forge a more equal future where the sins of the past and the partial failings of the present can be brought together in a more beneficial future for all.

Moths tackles the rampant inequality and gender bigotry of the current age by illustrating how society’s over-reliance on men to run everything from engineering to tech, energy and host of other functions critical to society’s smooth functioning, almost immediately dooms the world.

While there are a legion of talented women out there practising their professions, their numbers at the time of the moth apocalypse are such that when the men disappear, there simply aren’t enough women left to step into the breach as fully as civilisation needs.

Thus, things like petrochemical fuel production and the internet fall by the wayside, victims of society’s present pandemic-decimating inability to fully incorporate the full talents of half of its population.

It’s a grave error and a crime against one critically talented and important gender, and it almost consigns humanity to oblivion, with those who survive, largely it seems in the UK and Australia – no other countries are specifically mentioned though it’s believed the United States has been wiped off the map – having to work fast and hard to build something new out of instant almost nothing.

Quite whether what has been built on the moth-addled ashes of the past is worth preserving in its entirety fuels much of Moths as does insightfully thoughtful thinking on the inequity of the “before” world and how so much needs to change, preferably without an apocalypse necessitating it, if humanity as a whole is to enjoy a sustained and richly beneficial future.

As dystopian thrillers go, Moths is breathtakingly good, full of tense, adrenaline-fuelled action, emotionally resonant moments and conversations that shine a light on what is broken in the present and must change for the better in the future, and how humanity as a species is balancing on the precipice with something as deceptively simple as the beat of a moth’s wings standing between us and possible annihilation.

This was an interesting dystopian tale told in a world where toxic threads left by moths infect only men, who either die immediately or turn into homicidal maniacs. The story is told mainly through the character of Mary, both 40 years ago when the virus broke out and in the present when Mary is a 70 year old caregiver at a facility where men are isolated and protected. The world building is well-done and in addition to the usual concerns in a dystopian novel there are a lot of gender issues raised, which were quite thought-provoking. I look forward to the sequel.

A feminist (definitely not) thriller (questionable) in a dystopian future that makes absolutely no sense. I kept saying I was going to put this book down, but then it shocked me again with a new level of ridiculous nonsense and I kept reading to see what it would pull next. One positive note to start off: I enjoyed having an elderly main character who was encumbered by her age in a realistic way.

Mary lived through COVID and just when everything was getting back to normal, a plague of moths came bearing an infectious disease that only affects men. I was immediately suspicious of the feminist integrity of this narrative because Mary’s best friend Claire is a trans woman who seems to exist solely so the author can affirm that trans women are men and affected by this plague. There is one flashback scene later in the book where Claire, whose fate was uncertain to the reader up to that point, is revealed to have succumbed to the disease and is hospitalized with all the other men. Then, she is taken to another facility and no conclusion to her story is given despite a throwaway line at the very end that Mary considered her a best friend. Mary’s reason for this is that she had no way to find Claire because she assumed she had never legally changed her name despite being medically transitioned so she wouldn’t know how to find her, which makes no sense.

On the topic of trans people, there do not seem to be trans men in the story at all, though there is one odd reference to a woman who has had a mastectomy/top surgery scars because (paraphrased) “some women just feel their breasts get in the way.” Queer women are quite prevalent though, and many wives are mentioned throughout the story. The secondary main character Olivia is a lesbian, but she is murdered and framed for killing and “grooming” a “helpless” infantilized man. She was a POV character but after she is killed the rest of the story is just continued from Mary’s perspective only which seemed like a very odd choice from a writing standpoint.

The book is not a thriller really, it’s quite slow in the beginning and any time things seem to be getting a little interesting it is interrupted by a flashback or forward to share the two storylines of Mary and sometimes her coworker Olivia experiencing the original outbreak and their present where they are dangerously close to considering that maybe men deserve an equal place in society.

Anyway, the worldbuilding. The disease only affects people with a Y chromosome (no one with is immune) and they have a 50/50 shot of relatively instant death or becoming “manic” (the book’s term, kind of offensive to people with bipolar disorder) and being unable to control the base male urge to… hurl horrible insults at women and kill them in cold blood (sometimes portrayed in an evil conniving way, sometimes portrayed as senseless), and/or kill themselves in their moments of lucidity when they realize what they’ve done. The only way to protect men (and the reason they still exist 40+ years later) is because they are kept in clean facilities and constantly monitored, not allowed much education or opportunity. Women are offered large incentives to carry a male baby and give it up to the government. We meet a character whose family is not getting enough food rations because none of them want to do that. Keep in mind that they apparently have in vitro fertilization tech advanced enough to always know and choose the chromosomes of children.

Of course, as far as the narrative is concerned, these men would still be much more dangerous than women, who the book claims are just naturally weaker and less capable then men, so they are also given testosterone blocking medication to keep them docile unless it’s their time of the month to earn money for the government as sex slaves (they don’t get paid at all and this isn’t even for reproduction, so I wouldn’t call them sex workers). The men are basically infantilized and given crayons while they’re locked up.

As women are not as good as men in this book, and obviously not that many of them were educated or had important jobs in our current world, they have lost a lot of the infrastructure that used to exist. In fact, the infrastructure like cell service fell apart on the very first day of the pandemic despite that making absolutely no sense (several weeks later the main character is able to use satellite navigation in a car). There are no cell phones, only landlines. There doesn’t appear to be television or computers either, entertainment seems limited to theater of some kind. The roads are in extreme disrepair and after 40 years old transit hubs still exist all busted up in the middle of a supposedly affluent city. Oil can’t be drilled for, so everything is somehow electric now even though that seems incongruous with the rest of their tech abilities, these vehicles have also been made all terrain to deal with the bad roads. Clearly, women don’t know anything about banks either, because there is some kind of barter system that uses paper credit slips and travel vouchers? But if you have an old quarter pre-moth pay phones do work. It’s a bizarre collection of circumstances that kind of just shows the narrative thinks women aren’t capable of running a society, and that no thought was put into the worldbuilding’s logic. I can only suspend disbelief if there is internal consistency.

So, what is feminist here? Clearly not the world itself, which paints all men as evil and all women as weak and incapable.

The government is not feminist either, with the Men’s Welfare Association the heart of its evil, wanting to keep men subjugated. There is one good government official and some scientists though, as it turns out there’s a vaccine that’s been developed, but the MWA are keeping it secret and only giving it to their pet sex slaves. Also apparently negotiating with Australia (the book is set in the UK) to give them the vaccine (how did they travel there if there’s no transportation?). There have been men’s rights movements that were put down in the past, because women are unwilling to go back to how things were before.

I guess the most feminist part is how the people who don’t want equality are cartoon evil bad guys, but Mary isn’t much better because the reason she wants men’s rights is to save her sons (both the one who is infected and living in a sanatorium and the baby she was pregnant with at the time of the plague beginning, who is now a vaccinated man). The most feminist character with a decent size part (Olivia) gets murdered by the MWA.

Back to the plot, though. Mary and company sneak a man out and prove their vaccine works, so they want show proof of it to the world. As addressed, technology is very limited and cameras (photo or video) do not appear to exist anymore, and they therefore employed Mary’s help in the first place because she has one. The only smartphone/video recording device still in existence, which after 44 years of being squirreled away in Mary’s dresser still works and holds a charge. I legitimately do not understand why this technology no longer exists. The end gets a bit thriller-ish with the evil MWA making Mary choose if she’ll give up her sons to save all men, and her managing to subvert them even though she’s in hospice as the book ends. There’s a bit of a weird fever dream scene where she hallucinates herself as a “feminist” moth who wants to kill men. The evidence is out there (somehow) and men might get rights someday. The end?

What the hell was this book. Legitimately.

In a different future, men around the world become crazed killers as the threads of the moths touch them. Years pass and the men's protection becomes captivity. Mary remembers her role in this huge change and considers the life changing decisions she made back then.

Moths by Jane Hennigan is a highly recommended dystopian novel concerning a pandemic which infects men and boys and is spread via toxic threads left by mutated moths.

The pandemic hit forty years earlier and either killed males quickly or turned them into raging killers. The surviving males are kept confined in special clean facilities to keep them safe. Mary was an adult when it hit and she remembers life before. Now she is in her seventies and works in a facility helping to care for the male residents. She has no real clout or power, but she does hear and has secrets. She also knows how to keep silent and simply do her job.

Mary's narration alternates back and forth in time between the present and flashbacks in the past. This novel depicts a world where women are in charge and men are subservient, sort of an antithetical A Handmaid's Tale (only not as well written) where the roles are due to natural forces rather than societal, at least at first. The characters are caricatures, but that and a role reversal of sexes is seemingly sort of the point of the novel and the virus is simple a way to set everything into motion.

The pace is even and the narrative is interesting enough to capture your attention and hold it throughout the entire novel. The ending is satisfying. Moths is a novel that you only need to know the basics before reading so nothing spoils it for you. Those who like dystopian fiction will very likely enjoy Moths. This is an impressive debut novel for Hennigan and it will be interesting to see what she writes in the future.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Angry Robots via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

A disturbing and utterly compelling book. Read it as a dystopian novel or a critique on the gender wars but either way it is utterly brilliant. Can't wait for the sequel.

Moths
by Jane Hennigan
Angry Robot (Mar/14/2023)
Your monthly literary dystopia comes in the form of Jane Hennigan’s debut novel is about a near-future world where toxins from the title insect have killed off half the men in the world and caused the other half to experience fits of murderous rage. Nearly half a century after the change, the few remaining uninfected men are kept in sterile facilities where they receive little education and are kept busy with crafts and stories. Society has collapsed, but it’s pulling itself up by its bootstraps, and the most powerful organization is the Men’s Welfare Authority, which controls the carefully managed stock needed for reproduction.

Moths is The Handmaid’s Tale for a post-patriarchal time, with more than a touch of Huxley’s Brave New World (1941) and a very credible thought experiment about what parts of modernity are most dependent on men’s bodies to survive. Told by Mary, a sixty-something caregiver in one of the facilities, we see the contrast between women and men raised in the new order and those who remember the old times, between those who long for the old days to return and those who fear what that return would mean. High Recommended for fans of literary dystopias.

I don't like moths. Sorry, but I don't. They eat your clothes, and will get up in your business without invitation. And in this book, they'll also kill or severely compromise your son, husband, father... basically anyone male they come in contact with. So suffice it to say, this book did not exactly lessen my distaste for these little miscreants. Anyway, we meet Mary, who has been living for many, many years in a post-male society. So long, in fact, that many of her colleagues don't even remember what having men in society was like. I found this take extraordinarily fascinating, to explore a society that is taking place so long after the fact.

While we are treated to flashbacks via Mary, and the storytelling of her new friend Olivia, most of the book takes place long after the fall of "our" society, and well into the remaking of a new one. A lot of the women are just fine with raising the men as a sort of pet, and for their own "use", if you catch my drift. But Mary, having lost loved ones of her own, just isn't willing to make that leap. Some of the men died from moth attacks, but those who survived were forever changed. Now, they're kept in institutions, and the men who were not infected are also kept in tight lockup, so they don't become infected.

The commentary is certainly on point, especially when younger members say things to Mary like "don’t be ridiculous. Their brains aren’t wired for complex ideas", much like men would have said about women not long ago (and, that a very gross subset would still claim today, frankly). But beyond the treatment of men in the present day, the stories that Mary and Olivia told were beyond heartbreaking. I could not even let myself go down the "what would I do?" questioning path in so many cases, because it was just too awful to extrapolate on.

There are so many great themes explored in this book, including of course who gets to control things in this new world, and why. And then, upon finishing, I was delighted to find that there is a sequel! I definitely need more of this world, and I hope that there can be some semblance of peace found in this dark world.

Bottom Line: Incredibly thought provoking, complex, and emotive, I loved Moths (but not moths- those guys still suck).

Thanks to Angry Robot Books and Netgalley for the ARC.

WHAT A STORY!!
Moths is a unique, chilling, and sobering dystopian tale of how the world and society changes and adapts when the majority of the world's men are killed or incapacitated in a pandemic. After a species of moth emerges in huge numbers from the Amazon, it's only men who are affected by the toxin. Many die within 24 hours, while others suffer brutal behavioral changes with no chance of recovery. How does society adjust? How do you keep the species going when most men are now gone?? It's a fascinating story of the how's and the why's and what is also wrong with the way things are. It is brutal, but also completely believable and easy to understand why things have ended up as they have. The male characters, Luca, Logan and Tony are so compelling and your heart just aches for them. This is a gripping story that will stay with you long after finishing the book. Very much looking forward to the sequel!!!

Truly excellent! Tones of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and 1984 - I never thought I’d read anything as good as these two favourites ever again but this is up there…

Mary is alone in a terrifying world where everyone she loves deserts her. She’s strong though, she’s managed to get by and do the best she can, giving the men in her care the best life possible.

I particularly liked how the author uses the past and present to describe the demise of society. When it all goes wrong it’s REALLY bad. The violence is shocking and quite hard to read. I imagined more than once how this might feel as a mother of boys. Harrowing!!

Would things really be better if women ran the place? As a women I’ve always thought we’d make better decisions and run a kinder society but now I’m not so sure. This book points out that power, control and greed are just ‘human’ I guess.

Easily 5 stars, really impressed and enjoyed every page.