For American Horror Story’s New Muse, There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Baby

American Horror Story has conjured up a haunted hotel, a mysterious freak show, an apocalyptic future, even a coven populated by a surprising number of Oscar winners. But it’s never focused on what may be the most mundanely terrifying experience of all.

That changes with the series’s upcoming 12th installment, American Horror Story: Delicate, featuring Emma Roberts as a 30-something desperate to have a baby and Kim Kardashian in a yet-to-be-revealed role that was written just for her. While plot details have been kept tightly under wraps—beyond a teaser that, while stylish, doesn’t exactly reveal much—anyone curious about where the show is going can get more than a few hints by reading this season’s source material: Delicate Condition, a new thriller by Danielle Valentine out August 1.

The title is ironic, of course. “The ways that we describe pregnancy*—delicate condition, bun in the oven, she’s in a family way—*it’s so infantilizing for something that is among the most dangerous, life-changing experiences that a human being can go through,” Valentine says over Zoom. 

Often, she adds, those euphemisms are literally adding insult to injury. Before they conceive, even those who yearn to have a child may not know that pregnancy can cause or exacerbate all sorts of insane-sounding physical ailments: morning (or all-day) nausea, sure, but also excessive salivating, debilitating rashes, tooth decay, something literally called “lightning crotch.” More serious complications, the sort that threaten the life of the mother or the baby or both—like preeclampsia or the premature rupture of membranes—can arise seemingly without warning, and doctors usually can’t explain what’s causing them. Miscarriages aren’t well understood either, even though up to half of all pregnancies may not make it to term, according to one estimate.

“I just always come back to this feeling of, But isn’t this the oldest medical problem?” Valentine says, audibly exasperated. “I just don’t understand how we haven’t found some way around that. It’s literally the only medical thing that affects every single human being on the planet. And yet we’re trying to make it seem like it’s this niche women’s issue.”

Valentine wove that palpable sense of disbelief through Delicate Condition. The story follows Anna Victoria Alcott (to be played by Roberts), an actor in her late 30s whose career is unexpectedly exploding as she embarks on her latest round of IVF. But someone—or something—seems to be sabotaging her efforts: changing calendar invites so she misses doctor’s appointments, leaving her all-important hormones to spoil on the kitchen counter overnight. She wonders, perhaps, if she’s just losing her mind. (She isn’t.) 

Even when—spoiler alert?—she finally does get pregnant, Anna doesn’t feel safe. But by that point, the problem isn’t external. It’s the notion that whatever’s growing in her womb, a creature with sharp edges and unpredictable movements and blood-curdling appetites, has gone very, very wrong.

It’s hard to write a horror story about pregnancy without evoking a very famous specter; the cover of Delicate Condition faces that head on, with a blurb that calls the book “the feminist update to Rosemary’s Baby we all needed.” But to Valentine, there’s an important distinction to be made between her novel and Ira Levin’s, adapted into a classic Roman Polanski film. 

“So many moments of that book, I’m just like, So, yeah, this was written by a dude,” she says. “Her feelings and emotions about her unborn child are always completely positive, completely motherly. And I think that that is an experience of motherhood. But I was really interested in the times when Anna is fully terrified by what’s inside of her. I felt that when I was pregnant—I wasn’t giving birth to a demon, but I definitely had complex emotions. I was afraid of losing my autonomy.” Rosemary, meanwhile, is “literally pregnant with the Antichrist, and she only is worried about his safety.”