Happy Spooky Season! This month, we will look at some spooky new releases and a few paperbacks. This book was just released on October 1st and explores the life of an unusual family living in isolation on a bog in Appalachia. The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister is surprisingly relatable considering, at least to my knowledge, most people don’t have a mother built by a bog.
A family, bound by ritual, knows that their very survival depends on being worthy caretakers of the bog where they live and on following the rules and rites their family has followed for time immemorial. They care for the bog and when their father’s life ends; they give him to the bog, knowing that the bog will fulfill their compact and, in return, provide the eldest son with a wife born from its depths. All children of the Haddesley family have been born from this covenant and know the role they must play. Even Wenna, the sibling who left the family and ventured out into the world, returns to perform the ritual. But things don’t go as planned and Charles, now the family patriarch, will find that perhaps this life of isolation and sacrifice wasn’t exactly as they were told.
When I started reading The Bog Wife, I wasn’t immediately sure when it took place. The family is so completely isolated; that it is hard to get your bearings. We find that the siblings, and presumably all previous generations, have gone without such basics as medical care, schooling – beyond a very inadequate homeschool, and even birth certificates and social security cards. When Wenna, the rogue sibling who ran away to society after their own bog mother disappeared, returns she has a cell phone. It doesn’t work at the bog, but it gives us some context about when this is happening.
Appalachia has its own unique flavor. Its own eldritch horrors born from the landscape and its rich history. The area I grew up in is a part of Appalachia, and our urban legends are strange and mythical. A mix of working-class fears and the magical, sensational folklore brought to the region. The spooky, fog-covered hills and forests aren’t doing anything to ease anyone’s mind, either. A favorite of mine is the Green Man legend, sadly based on a true story, molded into something even more horrific over time. The Bog Wife captures the region beautifully. The landscape becomes its own character, and it has things to say. Things we might not want to hear.
This is a book that is a little mis-marketed. At its core, this is a family drama. Siblings dealing with loss, their relationships with each other, their purpose, and what their family will be when all they know has shattered. It’s unsettling but never scary. It’s full of grief. It’s weighed down by burden. No horrors were waiting beneath the bog, only secrets.
The Bog Wife Spoilers
As per usual, I can’t resist a tiny spoiler section. The ending of The Bog Wife just didn’t quite do it for me. There is this beautiful family with so much backstory and so much baggage that we watch slowly come to terms with the reality that they cannot go on as they are. Isolated, trying to refuse change. Their father would not let the bog become something new and so he buried the mother beneath it, hoping to halt its progress. She is freed to become one with the land herself, something the youngest son and daughter follow her into. They lie on the ground and are absorbed into it. I wanted to see them blossom, but not exactly like that.
The remaining 2 daughters stay in the uninhabitable home with the eldest giving birth and at least giving her daughter her own name, but I hope she also gets some medical care. Only the eldest son leaves. I don’t know that I needed them all to abandon their ancestral home, but I wanted to know they had a reconciled with each other and with the world. Perhaps we just never do. But god would Nora have loved going to an animal rescue.
This won’t be something you need the lights on to read, but it might be something that reads you, just a little.
Get the book here.
For something a little spookier and still with a Gothic flair, have you considered going just a little mad?
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