The Bog Wife

How big does a cult have to be to become a cult? Does it have to be thousands of people? Hundreds? Tens? Could one family be a cult? If you brought your children up in a remote location without access to the internet and media, it may be possible to make them believe almost anything. Like a tale about how your family are the protectors of a bog and that you can never leave the perimeter. Your role is to maintain the bog and The Bog Wife who lives within. 

To some the Haddesleys are the eccentric family that live out in the bog in their run-down folly of a house. To most, they may as well not exist. While the outside world is shopping at Walmart and going to bars, the Haddesleys are maintaining the rituals needed to support The Bog Wife. Father is dying and that means the time is coming for a new Bog Wife to be formed. Will the rituals work? Are they even real? 

Folk Horror seems to be en vogue currently and I am all for it, especially when an author like Kay Chronister does something a little different with the format. Bog Wife has the trappings of the genre; a remote location, strange rituals, but in this case, there is no stranger visiting. The closest we have to someone the reader can relate to is the eldest daughter Wenna, who fled the bog some years earlier, but has returned to bury her father. 

Folk Horror often has that slow drip of terror as strange occurrences build up to the horrific, but in this case, Chronister plays with the reader’s sense of doubt. Is there an actual Bog Wife at all? The book explores the idea of a small family cult. If children are brought up knowing nothing different, would they just do as their father says? The story is told from the perspective of the different children. They all have different views on life in the bog, all have drunk differing amounts of Kool Aid. 

The messed-up family dynamic is the key to the book working and at times it feels like one of the dark Netflix documentaries about cults that are so popular, but Bog Wife is in the fiction section for a reason. The story does slowly evolve so fans of spine-tingling tales will not be disappointed. 

This is a mild horror book, the situation that the children find themselves in is worse than any type of body horror or scares the novel may have. I would class the book as modern Urban Fantasy, with elements of slight horror. It is a book for readers who enjoy complex family dynamics or stories that make you question the very fabric of what you are reading. The Bog Wife is a clever take on the Folk Horror genre and one that kept me guessing the truth until the end.