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The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to welcome award-winning author Kay Chronister to the Midtown Scholar Bookstore for a book signing on her new novel, The Bog Wife. This event is free and open to the public and will take place at the Outdoor Tent Sale from 1pm-3pm on Saturday, October 12th.
About the Book:
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.
About the Author:
Kay Chronister is the author of Thin Places and Desert Creatures. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. She lives outside of Philadelphia.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Midtown Scholar Bookstore, 1302 N 3rd St,Harrisburg,PA,United States
