Short story writer and novelist Kay Chronister (Desert Creatures) spins a terrifically creepy Appalachian fairy tale-turned-horror story in The Bog Wife. The five Haddesley siblings--Eda, Charlie, Wenna, Percy, and Nora--grew up under the thumb of their strict patriarch on bogland in West Virginia. Based on their father's word, they all believe--albeit some more worshipfully than others--that they are part of an ancestral supernatural covenant: the bog will sustain their survival, if they sacrifice their patriarch to it in exchange for a bog-wife who will bear the successor's child.
But at the end of their father's life, once they lower him into the bog to his death, the children are disturbed when no bog-wife appears. Blaming Charlie, the older brother he perceives to be inadequate, Percy goes about trying to conjure his own bog-wife, while eldest Eda leaves the bog for the first time to find another way of reproducing. Wenna grapples with whether she should stay to support her siblings or return to the life she has built without them, while Nora, fearing nothing more than loneliness, does whatever it takes to keep her siblings together. Finally, dejected Charlie looks for answers in the local community, only to discover their family's long-held secrets, the ones the patriarchs before him sacrificed themselves to keep buried in the bog.
Like the rest of Chronister's oeuvre, The Bog Wife offers a lavishly imaginative world that is equal parts grotesque and beautiful, dying and yet full of life. But unlike Desert Creatures, which stares into the raw sun of wastelands, The Bog Wife luxuriates in the wet peat and lush vegetation of an environment that may be fast disappearing, yet is nonetheless still seeping, sucking, and blooming. Chronister's attention to this particular setting's detail opens the novel up to generative eco-critical readings. Rather than coming off as sanctimonious, however, The Bog Wife embraces the uneasy moral and aesthetic landscape of the gothic haunted house trope.
But who must stay and who can escape the haunted house that is the bog? While the bog world is expansive, Chronister still leaves room to dig deep into each of her five protagonists, a rare feat. As the siblings navigate this mutable and dangerous landscape, readers are left to contemplate the nature of covenants and the legacies they impose on future generations. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: Kay Chronister's The Bog Wife, as atmospheric as it is thoughtful, will delight fans of Karen Russell and Angela Carter alike in its marriage of eco-speculative fiction and gothic horror.