ITCH!
Why did I do this to myself?! Or, more to the point, Gemma Amor, why did you do this to me?! I guess the new way Gemma Amor fans will recognize each other is by the squirming and scratching. I only made it about half a dozen chapters into ITCH! before the creepy-crawlies commenced, and I haven’t stopped itching since.
Josie Jackson is having a rough time. A fight with her girlfriend Lena ends with Lena throwing a brick at her head, landing her in the hospital, so she returns home to Ellwood from London to stay in her father’s rental home. Walking along a path she used to walk with her mother who died when Josie was a child, she stumbles across the body of a young woman who has obviously been dead for some time and is riddled with insects. An apparent reaction to the trauma, she starts feeling like she has ants and other insects crawling all over her, inside and out - ants which also act as her intuition as she learns who the girl was and starts finding - and remembering- other clues that lead to the identity of the killer.
The events following Josie’s return home make up the central thread of ITCH!, but Gemma Amor does a masterful job crafting multiple narrative threads to provide a rich background, such as exploring Josie’s life following her mother’s death from a mysterious illness - including flashbacks to her family’s life while her mother was still alive, flashbacks to her relationship with Lena, and details about the dead girls whose bodies she finds.
iTCH! Also has a chilling folk horror element with the yearly Devil’s March, held for generations in their village and includes making a straw effigy of a woman, the Queen of the March, who is “sacrificed” by being thrown over a cliff at the end of the March.
ITCH! reads like a true crime inspired murder mystery but with a backdrop of folk horror, body horror that leaps out of the page and infects the reader, and a self-aware, thoughtful examination of mental illness and the classic Henry James-esque, is it supernatural or mental?
Even sans phantom creepy-crawlies, I can’t stop thinking about ITCH! Gemma Amor’s characters have depth and reading about them is like reading about someone you know. The passages where one woman talks about how no one cares about who her murdered daughter was before she was “troubled” made her grief somehow seem so real, and those small touches throughout ITCH!, making the characters real in this way is why this one is going to stick with me for a while (well, that and the welts).
Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the advance copy for my honest review. Pub. date: 10/9/25
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