Ivy Pochoda, Crime Writer and Squash Champ, Adds Horror to Her Résumé

New York Times

25-06-2025

There's more than one reason the novelist Ivy Pochoda has the opening line of the 'Iliad' tattooed on her upper right arm.
For starters, the verse — which in English is commonly translated as 'Sing, oh Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles' — presents literary inspiration as a decidedly female endeavor. For another thing, by going with the original Greek, a passion of hers since high school, Pochoda ensured that its first word would be 'μῆνιν,' or 'wrath.' And wrath, specifically as it relates to female rage and vengeance, is never far from Pochoda's mind.
The topic has played a role in much of her fiction, and it ferociously animates her new novel, 'Ecstasy' — the sixth written under her own name — in which she revamps 'The Bacchae' into a contemporary feminist horror story. It is set on the Greek island of Naxos, where Dionysus, the bad boy god of Euripides' play, is sometimes said to have been born.
Pochoda believes that the horror genre, given its truck with violence, gore and the supernatural, is an effective way to turn up the volume on issues of gender inequality, oppression and women's cratering social status.
'The imbalance starts to eat away at your sense of self, personally and professionally,' she said. 'There's still this institutionalizing of certain roles for women. There's a rage about that. Horror gets people to pay attention.' To that end, 'Ecstasy' — published by Putnam on June 17, and centering on an American real estate princeling with designs on a myth-shrouded part of the island — explodes into hallucinatory violence, blinding bloodlust and outbreaks of primal madness.
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