Introduction

"A lush, beautifully written novel about trying to be a person in our strange world . . . Pick this one up for its exquisite characterization, decaying settings and a dash of Southern gothic horror." —Kiersten White, The New York Times Book Review

A “haunting, brilliant” Appalachian folktale evoking the Southern gothic suspense of Sharp Objects and the eco spine-tinglers of Jeff Vandermeer (Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts)

Five siblings in West Virginia unearth long-buried secrets when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.” Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.

At once a gothic eco-horror, a psychological drama, and a family saga, The Bog Wife is a propulsive read for fans of Shirley Jackson, Karen Russell, and Matt Bell that speaks to what is knowable and unknowable within a family history and how to know when it is time to move forward.

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Excerpt

On winter nights, they burned heavy bundles of dried peat in the hearth and inhaled the scent of sacred ground burning while their father paced the length of the room, reciting the history of the Haddesley compact.

?He said, Our ways are noble; they are ancient.

?He said, Always the bog has belonged to us and we to it.

He said, A millennium ago, the father of our line was thrown into the mire as punishment for a transgression that he did not commit. His hair shorn, his hands tied, his mouth gagged, his clothes packed with stones. But he did not die. No man can tell what strange negotiations were made beneath the surface. But from that day onward, the bog was in him. When he rose from those depths, a woman rose with him to be his wife. You are bound now, she told him in her language, to the care of this land. Your sons’ marriages will reseal the compact between us. Your family line must not commingle, must not branch.

He said, Purity has been the way of our progenitors.

He said, It was unjust suspicions of sorcery that drove our ancestors from the old county, uncountably many years ago. But the first American Haddesley was led by his dowsing stick and the hold of the compact on him to this West Virginian bog’s very heart, and in this place he built our home.

Holding aloft an antique globe with his index finger on the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, his voice reunifying the continents that time had torn asunder, he said, They are the same mountains. The same veins of water. We are natives to this land. And still the bog’s custodians.

He said, Always the bog has belonged to us and we to it.

And they listened dreamily, the five of them, as they melted into a pile of blankets and limbs and lolling heads: Nora’s chin on Wenna’s shoulder and her feet tangled up with Percy’s feet; Eda stroking Percy’s bath-damp hair as his small head lay in her lap, her back propped against Charlie’s. They were so warm, so close.

Later, none of them could remember where their mother had been while their father told that story.

***

SUMMER

Nora

Nora found the trespassers sprouting brightly at the bottom of the dry swale, an entire zigzagging row of them, broad-headed and firm as if they’d been maturing there for months although they couldn’t have been there more than a week.

Her brother Percy was only steps behind her, rooting out the sedge that stubbornly sprouted and resprouted on the banks of the swale no matter how many times they tore it out. Any minute now, he would see, he would know. His face would transform: his lips sucked inward until they almost disappeared, his eyes low and narrowed like he could see the growth of trespassers from seed to sprout right in that very moment if he only looked hard enough. The deep and focused calm that came over him as he worked in the bog—and sometimes, on the best days, lingered in him afterward—would give way to panic. For the rest of the day, he would be consumed by what-ifs and whatnows. He would spend hours opening and closing their battered old copy of A Field Guide to Flora of the Highland Fens in the futile hope that the trespasser’s name and picture might somehow appear there. Eventually, he would get up the nerve to inform their father, who would not under any circumstances know what to do to help but might, depending on his mood, reply with a thunderous arms-waving injunction to do more! or only nod as if he had already known and sink further into his sickness like it was despair that was eating away his stomach, not cancer. After that, for the rest of the night, everyone would be polite in a way that was like a membrane stretched thin across their anger, Percy resenting Charlie for not doing the custodian’s work that was his firstborn obligation and Charlie resenting Percy for reminding him that he should have been the one doing it, and Eda resenting them both for upsetting their father, and Nora stuck at a silent dinner table, resenting no one, terrified by how fragile were the ties that held them.

With a furtive glance back at her brother, she reached out and grasped the trespassers in her fist and yanked them out by the stems. She felt a heart-hammering little slip of relief as she lifted her hand to her pocket and hid the trespassers there, thinking that the night was spared. Percy would remain in that calm and focused half-dreamy state. He would be able to tell their father he had cleared the swale enough to open the lock that held back the river and flood the bog’s thirsty mouth without fear of contaminating it. Charlie would emptily but sincerely offer to help with the bog’s flooding, and Percy would tell him it was all right, it wasn’t his fault, and he would even mean it. Eda would make something edible for dinner.

But then Percy crouched behind her, and she saw him seeing the torn ends of the stems left in the ground, thin but conspicuous orange shoots that she realized now he could never have missed, and everything was worse than before, because now the trespassers were her fault.

“What is this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Nora blandly, her fingers squeezing around the waxy flesh of the trespassers in her pocket until her hand became a fist.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t see it.”

“See what?”

“Look.”?

Nora reluctantly turned and made her way back to him. Percy was two years younger than she was, twenty-two to her twenty-four, but so forceful and self-assured in their father’s old waders. A foot away from his hunched form, she stopped and crossed her arms before her chest. The small bulk of the trespassers burned in her pocket as if they had grown from her hip.

“What?” she said.

“This is bad.” He brushed away soil with his fingers and uncovered the white knob of the trespassers’ feet in the dark earth. He yanked the knob loose with an audible snap. A ragged mass of spidery roots trailed from his fist.

“Oh,” said Nora, emptily, because she knew Percy would be worried if she agreed that it was bad but angry if she protested that it wasn’t.

“They’re new,” he insisted. “I don’t even know what they are. Orange stems like that, I’ve never seen before.”

Nora uncrossed her arms then crossed them again. “Well, you got them out. And it’s only the swale, anyway.”

“Yes, and the swale goes to the bog’s mouth,” Percy said, as if she didn’t know that. “Anything in the swale could get carried to the bog. And I didn’t get them out. There’s roots.”

“Dig out the roots, then.”

“You can’t do that with mushrooms.” He raked his fingers through the small crater left by the trespassers’ extraction. “There are roots all through here.” Percy was on the brink of despair. “They’re everywhere.”

Nora fidgeted with the trespassers in her pocket, fighting the impulse to tell Percy to calm down, which never calmed him.

She wished he wouldn’t always be so anxious. The fear that animated him only made her tired and limp with helplessness. She understood as well as he did that the trespassers meant something was wrong, but if she really accepted that the bog could be sick enough to die, the world became hostile, the future hopeless, their shared life as precarious and small as the lives of the flies that fell into the mouths of pitcher plants and never came out again. So she did not think about it. They were doing what they could: feeding the bog’s thirsty mouth with filtered water siphoned off from the river, plucking out trespassers when they found them, crossing the tender shuddering mat of sphagnum moss around the bog’s mouth as rarely as possible, and then only on bare feet.

“Maybe Charlie would know what to do,” she said.

They both knew that Charlie did not know what to do. That Charlie was, in no ways that mattered, really the bog’s custodian. But by reminding Percy that he was neither the custodian nor even next in line to be one, Nora hoped to discourage him enough that he would go inside with her.

Percy answered her with a dark look. It was an acknowledgment that she’d tried to hurt his feelings, not a concession that his feelings had been hurt. “I have to tell Dad,” he said, in the low half-muttered register that meant he was mostly talking to himself.

Nora tore her fingers away from the mash of fungal tissue in her dress pocket and followed Percy back through the pitted landscape of hollows and hummocks, close enough that they brushed against each other as they found their footing with a shared set of instincts. When they got to the house, they stood on the back step to unstick the wet earth from their feet, leaning habitually on each other’s shoulders for balance. They were still unsticking when Eda opened the back door and told them their father was dying. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. The novel opens with Nora’s decision to hide the “trespasser” mushrooms that she sees in the bog from her brother Percy. Why does Nora make this decision, and how does it set the stage for conflicts between Nora and her siblings later on?

2. What roles do Eda, Charlie, Percy, and Nora play in the family at the beginning of the novel, and how do their dynamics change through the course of the story?

3. Much of the Haddesley family believes that Charlie is not up to the job of being the bog’s custodian. Do you agree? Why or why not? What does being the bog’s custodian seem to involve, and what do you think it should involve?

4. On page [54], Wenna recalls a conversation with her husband Michael where he accuses her of fearing everything sacred. She answers, “how is it sacred if you’re not afraid of it?” Why do you think Wenna feels this way? How are fear and worship intertwined for the Haddesley family?

5. The Bog Wife draws from a tradition of fairy tales about men who marry magical non-human women, such as selkie stories. What does the novel suggest are the consequences of this kind of marriage? How does the marriage between Charles Haddesley and the bog-wife seem to affect their children’s views on marriage, love, and sexuality?

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