“Before her return, Wenna thought many times about what it would be like to see her family again and a few times, with half-guilty yearning, of how it would feel to see the land where she had grown up, but she had not considered how it would feel for the land to see her, and now she thought that was what she should really have been worried about. The bog looked eyelessly; it felt knowing. The white pines and maples, leaning on their above-ground roots, seemed to incline their heads towards the car.”

Kay Chronister’s debut novel Desert Creatures (2022), a deeply original and disconcerting Weird Western, established her as a key voice in speculative fiction. Her second novel, The Bog Wife (2024), is another triumph, an Appalachian folk horror that subverts notions of the patriarchal nuclear family whilst suggesting new posthuman ways of living with the environment. Chronister is an expert at creating atmosphere, especially around landscape, and The Bog Wife is utterly seeped in the soggy Appalachian bogs and the crumbling stately home built upon it. The novel vividly mixes elements of the gothic with the New Weird, creating a dark and compelling read. But it is Chronister’s remarkable character work that makes this book so great, a nuanced and sympathetic portrait of a deeply strange family undergoing a terminal crisis. The Bog Wife is one of the highpoints of speculative fiction in 2024, and promises further great things from Chronister in the future.

The Haddesleys share an ancient compact with the bog. Generations of Haddesley patriarchs have tended to the bog, and in return, the bog wife emerges from the bog, a creature made of the mud, plants and detritus, that marries the patriarch and sires him the next generation of Haddesleys who will inherit the bog on their father’s death. Charles, the current patriarch, is dying, so he calls all his children to him so they can enact the final ritual that will return him to the bog and summon forth the next bog wife. Eda, the eldest daughter, has been caring for her father during his illness and shouldering the family responsibilities. Charlie, the eldest son and the default heir to the role of patriarch and everything  that comes with it, never wanted to inherit his father’s mantle, even moreso now that an accident from a tree falling on him in his sleeve has left his genitals mangled. Wenna, the daughter who escaped and tried to make a life for herself away from the Haddesleys and the bog, is called back to her dying father’s side and despite swearing never to return, reluctantly follows the call of her family. Nora, the youngest sister, spends her time caring for injured creatures and just wants everyone to get along now her beloved older sister has returned. And Percy, the youngest son, is drawn to the duties to protect the bog and nurture it far more than Charlie and is beginning to feel jealous of the birthright his elder brother neither appreciates nor wants. All of the Haddesley children mourn their mother, Charles’ bog wife, who withdrew from the family until her mysterious disappearance. When the ritual meant to enshrine Charlie as the next patriarch fails to produce a bog wife, suddenly everything the Haddesley children have been brought up to believe is thrown into question, and the tensions between them come to a head. The bog is dying, and has rejected the Haddesleys’ compact. Can the family survive, and what will they awaken in place of the benevolent bog wife?

The abusive ailing patriarch who gathers his estranged family back to the ancestral home for his death is a classic gothic trope, but as with everything in The Bog Wife, Chronister ensures that nothing is as it seems. Instead of providing us with just the viewpoint of the outsider sister, so putting all the other members of the family under the reader’s suspicion, Chronister splits the novel more or less equally between the five Haddesley children. Thus, while they are undoubtedly a classic gothic family with an unhealthy co-dependency and an endless store of unaired grievances and dark secrets, the reader gets to spend time in each character’s head, getting to know and understand the reasons for their eccentric behaviours. If not every family member is sympathetic, then at least all of them have understandable motivations and reasons for their actions that allow us to see where they’re coming from – the only real monster in the family is the abusive patriarch who has forced them all into this bizarre situation. 

The Bog Wife also draws on elements of folk horror, which again it plays with in interesting ways. The Haddesleys are bound to the bog in an ancient compact, yet after their father’s death, Charlie and his siblings discover that the family history their father indoctrinated them with, and the arcane rituals which they are meant to follow to maintain the health of the bog, are not as old as they had thought. The Haddesley compact ultimately is a symbol of patriarchal control over nature, an extension of Charles Haddesley’s rigid control over his family. As Charlie, Eda, Nora, Percy and Wenna discover, their father’s abusive and controlling relationship with their mother symbolises the Haddesleys’ selfish and destructive ownership of the land. Charles Haddersley can only see the land as a resource for him to control and tame, in much the same way as he sees his bog wife as a possession to be mastered that must produce him an heir. The story of the novel is the story of the Haddesley children coming to realise this, and that for them and the bog to survive and thrive, they must come to a new compact with the land, one which is more nurturing and sharing rather than domineering and exploitative. Similarly, they must repair their damaged relationship with each other, shaped by the abuse and expectations of their father, in order to survive each other. Chronister ultimately leads her characters to a more rhizomatic relationship with the land and each other, one that rejects the destructive hierarchy of the patriarchy and the nuclear family for a more constructive and egalitarian way of relating.

The Bog Wife is a bold ecological fable that acknowledges that our destructive relationship towards each other and towards our environment are inextricably linked, and that to move forward involves rethinking both. It is a powerful and haunting novel, and Chronister never loses control over her complex material. It further establishes Chronister as one of the great practitioners of the modern Weird, and I look forward to reading whatever she writes next. 

The Bog Wife is available now from Titan books, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org