Fiction by Kay Chronister, reviewed by I.S. Nugent
THE BOG WIFE (Counterpoint Press)
The Bog Wife begins with a burial and a missing monster bride. For centuries, the Haddesleys, an ancient and noble family, have lived on a cranberry bog in West Virginia. They are bound to the bog as its sacred custodians, intimately so. Every generation of Haddesleys buries their patriarch in the bog, and in exchange, the bog produces a “bog wife” to marry and bear children for the eldest Haddesley son.
But this time, when the present-day Haddesleys—Eda, Charlie, Wenna, Nora, and Percy—bury their father in the mire and wait for the mysterious bog wife, she is nowhere to be found. Charlie, the reluctant heir-apparent, hunts the bog meadow for hours for his bride, “seeing phantom wives in every raised hummock of earth and rotted log.” After a painful fall puts an end to Charlie’s search, he comes to the cold realization, “She was not there. The exchange had failed, or he had. He had no wife. The bog had not made him one.”
I like the repetitiveness of those lines—she was not there; he had no wife. It’s the language of someone trying to find meaning, swapping subjects with objects until they can process the new reality. Kay Chronister’s delicate and deeply eerie new novel explores exactly this—a family processing a new reality after the rituals and stories they’ve believed in their entire lives fail them.
In an interview with Electric Literature, Chronister shares that she was finishing a dissertation on British history when she started writing The Bog Wife. It’s no wonder then that the Haddesleys feel reminiscent of a royal family. Like royals, they are preoccupied with “purity”, tradition, and continuing the family line. They view the bog as their kingdom (“Always the bog has belonged to us, and we to it”) and their sprawling manor is filled with evidence of their specialness: oil portraits and ancient books and other treasures passed from Haddesley to Haddesley for hundreds of years.
But after the exchange for Charlie’s bride fails, it appears something is deeply wrong. Wenna, the middle child, certainly thinks so. She has returned to the family home, after running away from home at seventeen, and she suspects that her father caused their bog-mother’s disappearance. The burial is the first time she has seen her family in ten years, and she is overwhelmed by their obvious sickness. Her siblings are gaunt and waxen. Their house is covered in filth and collapsing from the weight of a fallen hemlock tree. The bog itself is noxious and stinking, giving off an “unwholesome, poisonous odor” that it never emanated during Wenna’s childhood.
Wenna sees the missing bog wife as an opportunity to start over. Perhaps she can sell the house and her family can live new lives beyond the property-line. In a tender moment midway through the book, Wenna imagines her siblings’ lives “where all their impulses that were now only destructive and impotent might otherwise be directed, might even be useful.” Sensitive, soft-spoken Charlie as a librarian. Eda—who might have the worst case of Eldest Daughter Syndrome in fiction—commanding boardroom meetings.
Wenna’s siblings don’t share her visions for the future; this conflict is where the book shines. Chronister glides from sibling to sibling, probing their thoughts, fears, and secret desires. Eda reasons that, even though the bog has given up on its half of the bargain, there is no reason the Haddesleys should change their ways. Let us act coy and unaffected, let the bog know we don’t need it. There are other ways that they can make a Haddesley heir. Charlie is convinced that it is he who has failed the family, some deep-down wrongness inside of him that the bog (and his father) has always felt. He retreats inside of himself, turning to the local library for answers about their ancestry. Little sister Nora is preoccupied with keeping her family together. She’s content to pretend that nothing is wrong and perform their daily rituals if it means Wenna will stay forever. Percy, the youngest boy, the spare son, is consumed with hatred for his brother. If he was the heir, the exchange would not have failed. He finds a recipe scrawled in his father’s journals on how to hew a wife from naught. If the bog wife won’t come for Charlie, perhaps he can summon one on his own.
The drama of the novel comes from the collisions of the sibling personalities, the Haddesleys thwarting and ricocheting off one another like levers in a pinball machine as they reckon with their family legacy. With classic gothic flair, Chronister reflects the family’s turbulence in the weather. After Charlie’s ancestral research causes family secrets to teem to the surface, a storm brews and shakes the house. Trees crash through the windows. The wet and decay of the outside world seeps through the walls and pools onto the floor.
On a sentence-to-sentence level, the book is a series of rug-pull tricks; lush, natural imagery lurching into body horror. Consider the scene where Charlie attempts to find his bride: “He tried to think of nothing besides the sensation of the rain-saturated earth beneath his bare feet, cakey and soft, but then he considered that he was practically walking on his wife’s flesh…” The twistiness of Chronister’s language simulates the effect of stepping through a bog. You never know where you’ll find firm ground, or where you’ll misstep and plunge through the water.
The Bog Wife is melancholy throughout—the tone a heavy blanket that never lifts. However, Chronister’s poetic exploration of the stories that shape our lives, and what happens when these stories fall apart, makes the book unmissable.
I read The Bog Wife in the weeks following the presidential election, wheeling through the same emotions as the Haddesley siblings: rage, restlessness, and an impulse to close my eyes and shut everything out. While this political moment feels less like narrative collapse and more like a confirmation of everything we secretly feared, this book was a comfort. Things go wrong, and then we rebuild. We rebuild because things go wrong.
I.S. Nugent is a writer and book critic with work in The Bookends Review, Compulsive Reader, Bridge Eight Press, and Your Impossible Voice. Her short story “Ginger” received an honorable mention from the Anne Kirschbaum Winkelman Literary Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her boyfriend and their Jack Russell Terrier, Luke.
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