REVIEW: Man Hating Psycho by Iphgenia Baal

Mesha Maren on the push-pull of desire in MAN HATING PSYCHO, out now from Hagfish. If you don't know Baal's work, then you're fucking up.

Virginia Woolf tells us that “to read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.” I love this idea of reading like an accomplice, reading in such a way as to help the writer commit the crime that is the book.

I have decided that Iphgenia Baal would approve of reading like an accomplice. The Iphgenia Baal that I have stood with in the docks of Man Hating Psycho (Hagfish, 2025) is always on the lookout for her fellow worker. Let me be clear, I don’t know Iphgenia Baal. I would in fact be a little afraid of meeting her; afraid that I would fall too much in love. The Baal that howls and rips and tears through the pages of Man Hating Psycho is so alive, I might not survive meeting her in real life. Nevertheless, I will always be her accomplice.

In "The Artist and Society,” William Gass says that “works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.” By the end of Man Hating Psycho, I feel that I know the voice of Iphgenia Baal, the work-of-art-version of her, in the way that I might know someone I have traveled with. We’ve been in tight spots together and seen how each other respond; we’ve woken up together in weird places and had each other’s backs in moments like emergency sidewalk shits outside the 7-Eleven in Venice Beach. The characters in Man Hating Psycho seem to have roughly the same biographical details as the author, but the understanding that I feel is not about where she grew up or where her parents came from; it is more about the rhythms of spending time around a person. I know that in the darkest moments of the text, there is a beat of blindingly intelligent humor just waiting for me. Man Hating Psycho is alive and brimming with personhood. It seems to me that the text is its author, not in the simple “truth” way, but in its essence. The book slides along the subway bench toward you, leans in, whispers, laughs, and then scoots away.

Reading Man Hating Psycho feels like a kind of courtship, you’re pulled in—close, deep, physically in the first story—then pushed out into a generalized group chat, implicated in a gossipy way in the voice of a story within a story, and then distanced again with a third-person piece. By midway through the book, I was smitten. I sat smiling goofily, dazed and in love, just like the character in “Married to the Streets,” who smiles on as the narrator berates a table of bookshop owners and publishers in her “usual, awful, drunken manner.” As I read, I gave myself over to the text, trusting even when I was not sure that I wanted to or was fully capable of it. The payoff was tremendous. I can’t remember the last time I finished a book with such a rush of wildly mixed thoughts and emotions kicking through my bloodstream. I put the book down and I wanted to yell out loud Impressive!

Describing your experience of reading a book is an odd thing to do, and reviewing a book involves quite a bit of attempting to describe what it feels like to read a book. When Man Hating Psycho was published by Hagfish in October 2025, a buzz started up around Zona Motel—people talking about Baal, talking about Hagfish, talking about the book itself and its incredible cover.

We also talked about how the literary ecosystem in the United States has systematically been destroyed, leaving books like Man Hating Psycho out in the cold with very little critical reception. Somewhere in the late fall, I decided that I wanted to review Man Hating Psycho because the book seemed interesting, and I actually quite like writing reviews. I don’t think that I have any more talent for criticism than anyone else; I just like the process of reading a book while knowing that I am going to write about the experience of reading it. Knowing that I am going to write about a book makes me carry the text with me in a different way; I turn it over, rub it up against the various parts of my day, keep a running conversation going with it in my head. Harold Bloom called literary criticism “the art of making what is implicit in the text as finely explicit as possible,” and I think it is this process that I enjoy, attempting to express explicitly the inner weather that I experience while interacting with a text.

It also makes me question myself. We all have immediate reactions to art (Woolf called these impulses the “demon in us” that whispers “I hate, I love” when we are reading, which prevents us from fully immersing ourselves in a book) but to review a work of art, you should, in my opinion, examine those reactions—what exactly made the demon on my shoulder chant “I hate” during this or that particular passage. Often, when I am reviewing, I feel that I am examining my own mind just as much as I am examining the work of art. I feel obliged to push past my own initial confusion or repulsion or even my feelings of admiration- why do I admire this technique? If I am going to write a review, I will need to put into words not only my admiration but the exact source of that admiration. I find it thrilling to push past initial feelings of confusion or frustration. It feels like pushing through a membrane, and on the other side is something clearer, not always love, but a sense of the reason why a particular artistic choice has been made, how the aspects that frustrate me in one place in a text are directly tied to other aspects that elate me.

I am being vague. Let me try again. Iphgenia Baal’s construction of sentences, of paragraphs and stories, is so deceptively casual that at times I thought “Where are we going?” and “Do I really need to be in this pub with another obnoxious individual for so many pages?” The unequivocal answer is yes. Baal’s genius, or one aspect of it, lies in the way that she appears to lose control of her narrative, only to snap it into focus in the most breathtaking ways. The snap would not take my breath away if I had not meandered first; in fact, there would be no snap without the preceding looseness.

Man Hating Psycho is a book about communication, manipulation, masks, and frames. In “Pain in the Neck,” the narrator overcomes her better judgment and answers the phone when an old friend, Matey, calls out of the blue. Matey tells the narrator that he’s back in town and has a new girlfriend who is a big fan of the narrator’s writing. The narrator should come over, Matey says, and hang out, oh yeah, and bring along the records he left at her apartment a few years back. Not too far into the story, it becomes obvious that Matey’s girlfriend has never read the narrator’s books. Matey made that story up to get the narrator to bring the records over for a housewarming party he’s having. Only he’s not even there. The story becomes about the communication between the narrator and Matey’s girlfriend that occurs in his absence.

“Change : )” is even more explicitly about communication. Written in the form of a get-out-the-vote group chat message gone wrong, “Change : )” is reminiscent of Robin Hemley’s “Reply All” but with a much sharper edge. Where “Reply All” shows the mildly funny inner workings of a Midwest poetry appreciation group, “Change : )” cuts away the fat to expose the bones of the male ego through the supposedly well-meaning act of politically educating every single one of his Whatsapp contacts.

“Middle English Bestiary,” my personal favorite of Baal’s nine pieces, is a story within a story within a story. It opens with an excerpt from the Middle English Bestiary, a kind of encyclopedia of beasts. The excerpt appears in Man Hating Psycho in its original Middle English and, for the most part, is unintelligible to a modern reader, with only a few recognizable words peeking through. Fox. Devil. Raven. Hell. An online translator tells me that it reads, in part, “A wild animal is, there is one that is full of many tricks. Fox is her name, for her cunning. Farmers hate her for her harm done. […] The devil is a dear troublemaker. He lets it be known that he will not deceive us.” You will probably not be surprised to hear that Baal’s story involves deceit and devils of a few different varieties (there are also foxes, dead and alive, babies, and plenty of lies.)

It was while reading “Middle English Bestiary” that something snapped into place in my mind. I had felt, even before reading this story which begins in untranslated Middle English, that something in her work was calling across time, echoing through generations. It was a feeling that crept up in me as I read. The stories feel intensely personal and specific, yet they also recall ancient and ageless urges. At some point in the middle of the second story, I started humming “Hares on the Mountain” in my head. “Hares on the Mountain,” also known as “Blackbirds and Thrushes”, “The Knife in the Window”, “Lightning and Thunder”, “Crawling and Creeping” is an English folk song popularized by Shirley Collins and Davey Graham in 1964 and the lyrics are a sort of call and response on the topic of courtship, desire, and violence.

“Oh Sally my dear, it’s you I’d be kissing,” the song begins, “She smiled and replied, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing. / Oh Sally my dear, I wish I could bed you. / She smiled and replied, ‘Then you’d say I’d misled you. / If all you young men were hares on the mountain. / How many young girls would take guns and go hunting. / If the young men could sing like blackbirds and thrushes. / How many young girls would go beating the bushes. / If all you young men were rushes a-growing. How many young girls would take scythes and go mowing.”

When I reached “Middle English Bestiary,” it felt like confirmation of something I had been sensing all along. One of the beautifully trippy aspects of the act of reading is the fact that the artist has taken something from their mind and translated into language, which the reader then ingests and turns into images, moods, and allusions within their own mind (which makes reviewing a book an even weirder experience because here I am attempting to translate for you, dear reader, an experience I had in my own mind that was caused by the sequence of language put in place to translate an experience that the writer had in their own mind). Reading is two minds communicating by way of black letters on a white page. Sometimes reading feels like reaching into thin air and capturing a radio signal as it passes there.

The final “product” of the act of writing literature is not the physical book but the mind-movie that plays inside the brain of the reader who encounters the text. Like Schrodinger’s cat, the “reality” of the book flickers in and out of existence: it is both the images that Baal saw as she wrote and the images/associations that I experience when I encounter it years and miles away. It is not likely that Baal was thinking of “Hares on the Mountain” when she wrote her story “Pain in the Neck,” she may never have heard of the song but nevertheless she called it up in me. What in Baal’s writing about decidedly 21^st century characters flirting and destroying one another made me think of Middle English courtship? I suppose it was the push-pull of desire—the desire to fuck and the desire to control—that threads all through Man Hating Psycho in powerful shouts and whispers and that seems to reach both backward and forward and to speak of and for all of us beautifully debased humans for all time.