Review: There’s a sickness in the bog

Jeffrey Condran / InReview

Few things can be as powerful as our reverence for land. To whom does land belong, how and why, is often a sacred value that people are willing to enact violence to defend. Historically, it is also a patriarchal value, property passed down in a line from father to eldest son, a practice often fraught with high emotional tension — something Kay Chronister explores in her new novel, “The Bog Wife.”

Chronister is known for writing the “fantastic” or the “uncanny,” and brings this lens to bear on the Haddesley’s of West Virginia. The family believes that they have an ancient compact with the cranberry bog that is the highlight of their property. They dedicate their lives to the exclusive care of the land, and the land provides them with all of their needs. In fact, among its bounties, each generation of Haddesley patriarchs is given a bog-wife.

In an arcane ritual, the dead patriarch — always named Charles Haddesley; the current is known as the Eleventh — is buried in the bog, and then his son spends the night, nude, at its mouth and awaits the rising of his bog-wife to consummate their union. Though made of the peat and slime of the bog, the bog-wife is human in every way except for her tongue, which is wet and gray like the earth from which she came.

To themselves — and to the reader — the current generation of Haddesleys is an alarming brood. The children of Charles the Eleventh are Eda, Charlie, Wenna, Percy and Nora. With the exception of Wenna, who left home at 17 when her mother disappeared, none of the children have ever left the land.

They spend their time monitoring the water level of the bog and working to keep out any ecological “trespassers” that might change the delicate conditions that ensure the bog’s survival. This single outlet for their energies has consequences: Their isolation has made them strange.

They live in a large, dilapidated mansion and wear only clothing inherited from their Victorian ancestors. They are without social skills, and are, frankly, lucky to be able to feed themselves. Worse, their relations with each other are deeply dysfunctional.

Having no one else, they can seem very close, often sleeping together in a puddle of bodies for warmth — almost like animals — but like many adult siblings they regularly get on each other’s nerves and push each other’s buttons. The result is that they are at once a tight-knit group and very lonely people.

When their father becomes bedridden, his children must perform the ritual of succession in order to keep their compact with the land. However, they doubt their ability to pull it off and deeply fear the consequences. Charlie, the eldest boy, is affected the most. He does not have the aggressive confidence of his father, nor his passion for keeping the Haddesley line intact. When he and the rest of the family decide that the bog is “sick,” the real chaos ensues.

At one point Charlie believes the bog is trying to punish the Haddesleys, but instead realizes that it’s simply “trying to expel a sickness from its diseased pores. But was that any better? He could never not be a sickness.”

Chronister is a dynamic writer who has married a family chronicle to literary horror in a way that will excite many readers. Perhaps more significantly, she has, in this novel, perfected the idea of place as character.

The West Virginia land becomes a foil through which we see the messy tensions among the Haddesley siblings, and it is ultimately through the land that we come to see the ways that human beings bring strife and violence to the environment.

Near the end, Chronister has one of the character’s say, “this place will not survive not changing. You will not survive it.” It is a call to action not only to the Haddesley’s but to ourselves. “The Bog Wife” is a truly engaging novel.

Jeffrey Condran is the author of the story collection “Claire, Wading into the Danube By Night” and is the co-founder and publisher of the independent literary press Braddock Avenue Books.