#Review - What Kind of Mother by Clay Macleod Chapman

What Kind of Mother
Clay McLeod Chapman
Titan Books, 31 January 2024
Available as: PB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803368269

I'm grateful to Titan Books for providing me with an advanced e-copy of What Kind of Mother via Netgalley to consider for review.

What Kind of Mother is set in the swamps of Virginia, to which local girl Madi Price has returned with her teenage daughter. Living in a closed down motel and making a marginal living as a palm reader, Madi's trying to support Kendra as the girl bonds with the achingly respectable father who showed no interest in her when she was younger. One thread of the story therefore examines the seventeen-year-old's growing interest in both her parents (did I sense that she might be playing one against the other?) and where that leaves Madi - both mother and daughter have led a drifting life since Madi's parents threw her out when she got pregnant, but perhaps it's now time to settle down?

That leads me to Henry McCabe, a local fisherman who Madi knew at school. Life hasn't been kind to him, his wife having killed herself after their son, Skyler, vanished: Skyler is still officially missing. Madi runs into Henry again at a farmer's market and he asks for her help. Madi, who's basically a charlatan (in a fraught scene, her vague, well-intentioned advice to a young woman leads to catastrophe) begins to feel she is in over her head and that, perhaps, something may actually be trying to speak through her.

For both Madi and Henry, here, then, are are interrupted relationships and friendships from the past resurfacing. This is a milieu where nothing is ever truly lost to the waters, although it may be transformed. It's not exactly a world where everyone knows everyone, but it is a close community, which contributes to the sense that and the past will never lie. The writing here is rich, organic, linking the lives of the local community to the greater life of the swamp which comes across almost as a single, breathing, brooding entity, one that can send its emissaries into the small lives of the human at will.

Given that, the creepiness of this book is perhaps not surprising, but it is impossible to overstate. The desolate, marshy setting, a littoral place neither sea, river or dry land, haunts the reader with a sense of the primordial, a sense that in that fertile, silt-rich basin, anything may brew. There are monsters here but perhaps they transcend a simple notion of good and evil, driven rather by the need for survival and the desperate hope of people who have lost everything and want something, anything, back.

So, a supernatural horror, but so much more than that - a book that explores parental love, but admits the dark side of that, the need to control, the thin line between love and obsession, protection and control and leaves the reader to answer some very uncomfortable questions.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about What Kind of Mother, see the publisher's website here.