The Bog Wife

When a young woman, Wenna Haddesley, returns to her family's estate in rural West Virginia after an absence of several years, secrets bubble to the surface, and thoroughly impossible things become commonplace. The essential contours of the plot of Kay Chronister's outstanding new novel, The Bog Wife, might feel familiar enough: a dying patriarch of a formerly magisterial family demands that a child who has escaped the confines of the family estate, physically if not entirely mentally, must return to her childhood home in order to pay her final respects. Upon her return, the long-lost progeny, alongside her siblings, unearths secrets that will throw into chaos everything they thought they knew about the family.And yet, for a narrative structure so familiar, Chronister consistently surprises because, like any number of families in Appalachian literature, the Haddesleys have a deep connection to the land. Unlike most families, however, their connection is quite literal. At some point in the distant past, long before they immigrated to the Americas, the Haddesleys of Scotland entered into a contract with the environment, in which the family's patriarch would walk naked into the bogs of the Highlands and return with a wife formed of the mud and marsh, and with whom he would bear children. And with the elder Charles's impending death, it falls upon the oldest son, Charlie, to—reluctantly—keep his family's line going. Such is the strange and intensely fascinating world that Chronister creates for her readers.Fans of Gothic literature will find much to enjoy. Early in the novel, Chronister tells us that a tree has fallen onto the house and rendered several areas unlivable. Rather than attempt some sort of repairs, the family sequesters themselves to habitable areas while the house slowly falls to ruin around them. The parallels to Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” are manifold. Like Poe's unnamed narrator first encountering Roderick Usher, Wenna notes of her siblings, they “were not, as Wenna initially thought, just the same as they had been ten years ago. They were worse. They had spent the decade of her absence growing around one another like roots in the same crowded patch of earth, controlling themselves so everyone could fit” (132). Likewise, the slow disintegration of the house around them mirrors the family's own collapse. Perhaps the most significant point for fans of the Gothic will be that as the House of Usher seems to exist simultaneously in the present and as a relic, so, too, does the Haddesley home. It's both ancient and modern, Appalachian and also showing its Scottish heritage. Like the geography, the temporal scope of the novel feels warped, and events that seem as though they occur over a single weekend take place over months. All told, Chronister wonderfully disorients the reader to make them as uncomfortable and uneasy in the home as Wenna is upon her return.What seems to be an obvious domestic drama—and it is that, to be sure—also excels in its role as a piece of contemporary cli-fi, or fantastical literature in which climate change is the operative device. Excusing the obvious metaphor in the Haddesley's matriarch quite literally being a mother composed of nature, readers encounter far more nuanced treatments of environmental issues throughout the rest of the novel. Most pointedly, a concern for the environment emerges in Wenna's appreciation of her family's property and the horror at how far it has declined since her youth. As she considers the deterioration of the bog from her family's inability to care for it, Wenna considers: “The land was starving them now, the garden had never stopped struggling, and without the Walmart's inexhaustible supply of food from far-away corners of the world, the Haddesleys would have already starved” (105). In this quotation, Chronister succinctly encompasses not only the failures of the Haddesleys, but also the creeping encroachments of unfettered capitalism and mindless consumption into the lives of the community.In The Bog Wife, Chronister deftly weaves together scraps of environmental writing, domestic drama, horror, and Appalachia to produce a quilt worthy of admiration. A capacious story that will please fans of works as diverse as Jesse Armstrong's television show Succession, Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation, or the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe or Ron Rash, this propulsive page-turner is sure to leave readers wondering what Kay Chronister can accomplish next.