Book Review: "Baby Teeth" by Zoje Stage

Now, I have read books like “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and ever since the films “The Exorcist” and “The Omen” came out, we have seen numerous books and films of horror deal with the problem of demonic children. Many of these children have powers that, like in “The Exorcist” or “The Conjuring 2” are caused by supernatural entities and therefore can be fixed. Whereas, more commonly in “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, “The Omen” and in this book entitled “Baby Teeth” we see a child who is demonic but there is no real explanation for it. This, in my opinion, is far more frightening because as of yet in the early pages and chapters of the text, we do not know how far the child will go to get their own way, to do what they want to do and we are unaware of their agenda and whether it is working out, whether they are winning or which techniques are no in place to stop them from winning. Everything seems to collapse in on itself when we start learning about how the parents got to this point at which the child is now seen as demonic and a problem. This means that still, we are given no answers and are told that they were simply born this way. The question though is not the ‘how’ it is more the ‘why’ and the ‘what’.

“Baby Teeth” is a book about a seven year old named Hanna who does not say a single word. She does not talk - not even to her mother and father who are Swedish and encourage her communication. Their names are Suzette and Alex. They take her to psychiatrists and doctors, therapists and communication specialists and yet, nobody can find anything wrong with her health. Suzette begins to suspect that maybe Hanna does not want to talk. Hanna is perfectly fine though, communicating in other ways. For example: Hanna enjoys things like setting the cafeteria bin on fire at school, making a voodoo doll of her teacher, bashing another child’s head against a wall, injuring her mother, growling like a dog and many other non-verbal aspects of communicating her needs. But, only when her father is not around. As soon as Alex comes home, Hanna is the perfect child - though she still does not talk. Suzette, feeling like she is going out of her mind, must discover what her child’s needs and agendas are before it is too late. As she begins running out of time, we see that nothing that Suzette does can change the way Hanna behaves and as she begins to fear for her life, Hanna continues on as if everything she is doing is for the betterment of herself. It is a frightening tale of freudian complexes that will stick in your mind long after it is over.

A strange and often graphic tale, the author has written this book not just to be especially frightening but also to make a parent question all those odd things their child may say to them. The ways in which non-verbal communication are important in this text shows that they have been well researched to the point that the author is perfectly aware of what Hanna is trying to communicate when she is not talking, to her mother. A brilliant book filled with some of the most frightening things a child could ever do, this book really did remind me of all those possessed, demonic or just plain wrong children we have in the horror genre. But what we are looking at here is a child who is trying to manifest itself as the devil to its own mother - and that is bloody terrifying.