Stephanie LaCava: Nymph – Anatomy of a Carefully Kept Wound

-There had to be a word for that, when something makes you uneasy because it’s familiar and correct, and everything else is not.-
That word is Nymph.

It starts with a premonition. A subtle vertigo, like catching a childhood scent in an unfamiliar alley, or glimpsing someone in a dream who knows you better than anyone, but their name escapes you. Stephanie LaCava’s Nymph lives precisely in this space: the threshold between recognition and disorientation, between deep empathy and emotional vacuum. This isn’t a story that guides you, it pulses under your skin.

The final installment in her trilogy (The Superrationals, 2020; I Fear My Pain Interests You, 2022), Nymph doesn’t close the narrative arc-it frays it. Like a wound that refuses to heal, instead becoming a seeing eye. At its center is Bathory, Bath to those who dare come close, a being with translucent skin and a relentless gaze, named “after a blend of black metal and myth.” Her name is a mask, a cover, a charm. But also a weapon. And Bath is all of these at once, refusing the comfort of coherence.

The novel moves like a claustrophobic dream through urban and psychological interiors: stairwells, apartments, chambered rooms, flickering lights, harp music rising from the floor. Her encounter with Iggy, a figure both ethereal and corporeal, unfolds in a choreography of minimalist gestures and slanted dialogue, where every sentence is a possible key and every silence, a sealed drawer. Nothing is explained. Everything is felt.

LaCava writes like a symptomologist. Her sentences don’t assert—they infiltrate. The punctuation is obsessively precise; her lexicon reflects a consciousness oscillating between DSM-5 psychiatry and TikTok therapy memes. Yet there’s no cynicism, only a distorted tenderness, like hugging a cactus just to feel something warm. The author trolls the language of trauma, flips it, consumes it. The assassin becomes a medium for attachment. Every relationship is also a covert mission. Intimacy is encrypted.

Stylistically, LaCava flirts with the supernatural, but never abandons plausibility. “There is some level of magic, and then derangement in that magic.” She knows that the most potent otherworldliness is what throbs beneath the surface of the ordinary. A navy-blue painted ceiling. A match struck at just the right moment. A sports card with something slipped behind it. These are not props, they are portals.

And then there’s the dialogue, warm as a hand on your back in a dark room. “You don’t look human to me.” “Nymph, maybe.” That one line holds the entire book.

When you finish Nymph, there’s no moral, only a mood. The kind that lingers like someone’s scent in an empty room, or a promise left unsaid. A key, still warm in your palm. Maybe LaCava doesn’t write to reveal herself, but to hide better. And we read not to understand her, but to recognize her. Even from far away.

Go find her.