The Whitmans congratulate themselves on the moral superiority of their decision because Cherish is Black. A calculating teenager, Farrah, uses manipulation to secure an open-ended invitation to live with her best friend, Cherish, who was adopted as a young child by Brianne and Jerry Whitman, a rich, white progressive couple.

Morrow’s latest cinematic social-horror novel, Cherish Farrah, is right at home among these uneasy, atmospheric narratives, the hallucinatory effects of which are born of doubles. This review also appeared in the Monday Book Review Newsletter, sent to your inbox every week.īethany C. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan explores the horror that arises when a young ballerina notices the uncanny similarity between herself and another member of the company, who dances with greater artistic abandon. Such anxieties drive Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which considers a nurse who confides in her mute patient but struggles to differentiate herself. At the same time, a double also serves as a potent symbol, a metaphor for our own fears about identity-or its loss. Doubling might be literal in its manifestation: the character who looks like another character, the character who represents what another character lacks. Our fear of automatons, of dolls, of robots in human form is instinctive: here is this thing that looks like us, is able to behave as we do, but remains fundamentally mysterious and, for all we know, may be propelled by secret forces outside our control. Film auteurs have long understood that a double allures and frightens in equal measure.

Cherish farrah by bethany c morrow