Kay Chronister

Thin Places

Stories

A finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, Thin Places is a gothic and atmospheric collection from the national bestselling author of The Bog Wife. This beautiful reissue includes four additional stories.

A not-quite-human proprietor menaces guests at a hotel on the edge of a swamp. A composer visits a remote Slavic village where villagers perform soundless songs that accompany violent sacrifices. Four reclusive women conjour children out of unconventional materials in an unnerving mansion. The arrival of a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter portends disaster for an insular island community with bizarre traditions.

With transcendent prose that celebrates her hypnotic and humane vision of the strange and supernatural, Kay Chronister weaves a dark tapestry of love, grief, death, and the exquisite pain and joy of life on the periphery of the familiar. The fifteen stories collected here, chronicle the lives of powerful women and children, wicked witches and demons, cursed artists and overlooked communities. Thin Places is a perfect companion to Chronister’s national bestselling novel The Bog Wife and ideally suited for readers of Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado.

The Bog Wife

A Novel

"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.