The Rape Scene So Graphic It Made Me Quit Male Authors

I’ve always loved horror. I love the rush, the unease, the way a book can make you sleep with the lights on. But there’s a fine line between disturbing and exploitative — and Are Your Parents Home? by Jon Athan bulldozed right past it.

The novel is marketed as “extreme horror,” which already warns readers to expect violence. I went in ready for gore, brutality, even taboo subjects. What I wasn’t prepared for was a rape scene so long, so detailed, and so indulgent that it stopped being horror and became something else entirely.

The victim? A teenage girl.

The act? Drawn out over pages, with graphic descriptions and multiple objects.

The effect? Instead of feeling scared, I felt sick — like I’d been forced into someone else’s fantasy of violence.

And that was the moment I realised: I don’t trust male authors with women’s stories anymore.

When Horror Becomes Voyeurism

I want to be clear. Horror can and should disturb. I’ve read dark books before — Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, for instance, contains brutal rape scenes. They were painful to get through, but they had purpose. Carlton wrote them with awareness, with a sense of sisterhood. I felt devastated for the characters, not exploited by the writing.

But with Are Your Parents Home?, the scene wasn’t about trauma. It wasn’t about survival. It wasn’t even about the character. It was about shock value. The rape was written with such obsessive detail that it felt less like storytelling and more like spectacle.

That’s the difference: one book made me feel solidarity with the characters; the other left me feeling violated alongside them — and not in a way that deepened the story. In a way that made me want to close the book and wash my hands.

Why Women Don’t Trust Male Authors

Reading Athan’s book made me look back at other times I’ve seen women written badly by men. There’s a pattern, and it’s depressingly familiar:

• Women are introduced just to be hurt, killed, or raped.
• Their suffering gets more description than their personalities.
• Violence against them is framed like a spectacle, with the reader forced into the role of voyeur.

It’s not every man, not every book. But it’s often enough that I started noticing, and then I couldn’t unsee it.

At its core, the problem is that too many male authors treat women’s pain as entertainment. They write female suffering in technicolour detail while skipping over women’s inner lives. The result? Stories where women aren’t people — they’re props.

Why I Walked Away

After Are Your Parents Home?, I had a choice: keep pushing through books that left me shaken for all the wrong reasons, or change what I read. I chose the latter.

I stopped handing over my money and time to male authors who write women this way. If a book lingers on a teenage girl’s violation with pornographic detail, it’s not horror — it’s exploitation. And I don’t need that in my head or my heart.

Now I reach for stories that give women their full humanity. Stories that can still be violent, still be dark, still be disturbing — but that don’t use our pain as cheap spectacle.

What Better Writing Looks Like

When women write women, even in the darkest books, there’s usually care. You can feel that the character’s pain is written with empathy, not voyeurism. The scenes may still be brutal, but they don’t linger on every possible violation for shock. They leave room for the character’s voice, her agency, her survival.

That’s what makes the difference between Hunting Adeline and Are Your Parents Home?. One left me horrified but connected. The other left me feeling complicit in watching something I never wanted to see.

The Bottom Line

Are Your Parents Home? was my breaking point. The rape scene was so graphic, so gratuitous, and so focused on the body of a teenage girl that it stopped being horror and started being exploitation.

And that’s why I stopped reading books by men. Not because men can never write women well, but because too many still don’t. Too many still use our pain for shock value, for titillation, for the sake of being “extreme.”

Women deserve better. Our stories deserve better. And until more male authors figure that out, I’ll be finding my horror — and my humanity — elsewhere.