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.
Like the rest of Chronister's oeuvre, The Bog Wife offers a lavishly imaginative world that is equal parts grotesque and beautiful. 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