Martine Desjardins’s chilling and poetic Medusa is an incendiary story of women’s body shame and men’s body shaming, phallocratic oppression, and the power of femininity. Medusa inverts the traditional balance of power, throwing a light, both raw and refined, on monstrosity. She’s been called Medusa for so long that she’s forgotten her real name. She walks with her head down, her face hidden behind her hair to spare others the sight of her Deformities – eyes so horrible they repel the women and petrify the men. Medusa herself never dares to look at herself in a mirror. Driven from the family home, Medusa is locked up in the Athenℓum, an institute for young “malformed” girls, which stands on the shores of a lake infested with jellyfish. In the abyss of this dismal place, where Benefactors indulge in cruel games with their protÔegÔees, she gradually discovers the prodigious and formidable faculties of her ocular Sickenings. The day when Medusa finally emerges from her confinement, she sows destruction in her path. But before she can take revenge on the Benefactors who humiliated her, she’ll first have to face the treacherous gaze of her nemesis – and the deadly gaze of her own Abominations.