What to Expect When You’re Expecting Evil

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Children in peril have long been a plot staple in crime fiction and thrillers, and exploring motherhood through the lens of horror isn’t entirely new — classics include Ira Levin’s 1967 best seller, “Rosemary’s Baby.” Horror movies, too, have increasingly focused on domestic dread.

More recently, there’s been a spate of memoirs, essay collections and literary fiction about the complexities of modern motherhood, including groundbreaking books by Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Rivka Galchen and Samantha Hunt.

And yet, there still seems to be a paucity of realistic, nuanced depictions of the internal lives of mothers in popular culture. “Why, when there are scores of new books about mothers and mothering and motherhood, does it continue to feel like there aren’t any?” the critic Willa Paskin wrote last year in Slate.

Phillips, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and her two children, now 4 and 7, said that in “The Need” she aimed to capture not only the fear she feels as a parent, but the almost equally terrifying ferocity of maternal love. “The love you feel for them is so fraught and intense and visceral and animal,” she said.

She began working on the novel four years ago, but she had the idea for a book about the complexities of motherhood in 2012, when her daughter was born shortly before her older sister died from a rare neurological condition called Rett Syndrome.

“The Need,” which Simon & Schuster will release on Tuesday, grew out of the confluence of those life-altering events and Phillips’s sense that the things she loved and sometimes took for granted could disappear in an instant.

“She wondered if other mothers experienced it, this permanent state of mild panic,” Phillips writes in “The Need.” “What a phenomenon it was to be with her children, to spend every moment so acutely aware of the abyss, the potential injury flickering within each second.”

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