The success of Oscar-winning film The Substance has led to a proliferation – or should that be an ooze? – of so-called “femgore”. London-based author Ruthy Mason’s debut novel, Death Do Us, falls into this category as it sets out to skewer marriage and the commercial wedding industry as a suffocating experience for women.

It begins with Bea, an archaeologist who is newly engaged to the handsome, kind and wealthy Jake. Everyone tells her how lucky she is, but Bea seems to be having an adverse reaction to the family heirloom engagement ring that Jake has given her.

Her ring finger is swollen and painful, and as the weeks and months go by, and the hunt for the perfect wedding dress and preparations for a giant hen party intensify, her symptoms increase to include hair loss, tooth loss and scaly skin patches.

The novel is a dual-timeline story, switching between the unsettling present-day mystery of what is happening to Bea, and a historic college relationship with a possessive boyfriend.

In an era where the tradwife hashtag has more than 300 million views on TikTok, the metaphor of marriage as a slow, painful death for women’s personal agency and professional ambitions is a compelling one.

The story is engaging to begin with, creepy and mysterious, with sharp commentary on modern matrimony, and the opening and closing sections in particular crackle with atmosphere, energy and tension. These sections are the strongest, showing what this young writer is capable of.

But after the initial excitement of the opening chapters, the story loses momentum and becomes bogged down. The historical storyline doesn’t quite deliver. This is partly due to the fact that this strand of the story needed to be kept deliberately vague for far too long. Instead of heightening the tension, it has the opposite effect.

Femgore is supposed to be about women regaining their autonomy, often through liberating, righteous and sometimes even self-destructive anger – think Stephen King’s Carrie – but Bea is a mystifyingly passive and disempowered protagonist until the very end. Her lack of agency might accurately reflect the experience of brides-to-be caught in a consumerist wedding culture, but it comes at a cost to the reading experience.

  • Edel Coffey is a journalist and broadcaster. Her latest novel, In Glass Houses, is published by Sphere