What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman

Horror. Organic Horror. Southern Gothic. Family. Death. 

Rating: 4/5

Pages: 293

Started: 29 August 2024

Finished: 31 August 2024

Summary:

    Madi is a professional psychic, reading palms and living in a motel in her hometown near her ex-boyfriend's house so she can be near her daughter who, after seventeen years of living in a struggling two-woman household, finally decided to move in with her estranged father. When Henry, a childhood sweetheart, asks Madi to help him find his lost six-year-old son, Madi's instinct is to say no. She doesn't really believe in psychic gifts; she doesn't want to give him false hope. But as strange visions of water and sea creatures begin to plague her, Madi becomes entangled in fate, faith, and the strange and monstrous life of the missing boy.

Thoughts:

    This book started like a late-in-life romance, with a struggling mother finding love after returning to her hometown--but it did not stay that way. Madi was an objectively destructive person and an unreliable narrator, and also a mother who wanted to be near her daughter and had sympathy for Henry, who missed his own son. The organic horror of the story was  extremely effective: Skyler, the monstrous boy, was intensely gruesome. The descriptions of his peeling skin, and the way he was inhabited by sea creatures, made me faintly nauseous, although I was very impressed by the writing because of it. I was also struck by all the parenting and doubling: Henry and Madi were both parents with somehow estranged children; they both wanted their children to love them; there were two versions of Skyler, who had two mothers. I also loved the echoes of Southern mythology, as well as the questions of motherhood and monstrosity, and what it means to mother a monster--a very Grendel-reminiscent question. This book did seem to skip around a bit, and was a little harder to follow than I thought was helpful, although I do think the nebulous plot and indistinct rules surrounding what magic was real and what was Madi's imagination was intentional and cool at points. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves organic horror, or read Mexican Gothic or Grendel.