[Book Review]: Clay McLeod Chapman’s What Kind of Mother
Parenthood’s soft, vulnerable underbelly has never been so exposed.
Horror is a playground. The playground for all our worst fears and anxieties, where we can be our nastiest, dirtiest, most complex selves and still, somehow, find connection and survival. There has been a trend of late — at least in my personal reading patterns — of exploring the shadowy edges of this playground where feeling is at its deepest. There are superstars of subtlety when it comes to slipping the depth of meaning to you under the guise of a bloodied mask, but sometimes the most affecting, harrowing versions of this phenomenon are right in your face.
Clay McLeod Chapman is one of the best in the modern game for in-your-face, stomach churning, nightmare-inducing journeys through radical empathy. You could pull any of his work from a hat and find at its center a pulsing heart of need for connection to the true vitality of love. 2022’s Ghost Eaters was one of the most unexpectedly poignant meditations on grief and love I read that year, blubbering in the corner before I even truly realized what was happening.
2023’s What Kind of Mother is yet another journey through the tender nightmare world of Chapman’s brain, and it is rife with fears of loss and desperation that reach down to the core of humanity ingrained in us from the dawn of time. What would you do, how would you survive, how far would you go if you lost your child?
There’s a fascinating tension that fluctuates through the waves of popularity throughout the years over morally grey characters. They’re our favorite to hold dear even as we watch them ocassionally commit atrocities. We can reason our way through their unfathomable actions because we love them. Because a part of what is shining through back at us is a reflection of our own desperations, formed into a strength we may or may not already believe ourselves to have.
What Kind of Mother is a bottomless exploration of the areas of parenthood that turn us into versions of ourselves we never thought possible before. It follows Madi, a farmer’s-market-psychic making her living giving people hope in desperate circumstances to make ends meet in an attempt to get her own life together for her daughter — who spends half her time in suburbia with her father, Madi’s ex husband.
When a somewhat forced return to her old hometown leads to an encounter with ex boyfriend Henry, who has been battling an unfathomable loss of his own — the disappearance of his infant son some years ago — she is thrust into a labyrinthine terror. Henry insists she use her psychic abilities to help him locate his son Skyler, and Madi is forced to confront several inarticulable truths at once: while much of her profession is simply body language reading, there is something going on when the two of them focus their energies on the missing boy; Henry has never stopped looking for his infant son even as the town labeled him a sob story, and something is dangerously off about the whole tale.
Wherever you think What Kind of Mother is going, it will take you somewhere altogether else by its end. It is harrowing in its simplicity. There is a monster at the end of this book, but it will not be the one you imagine. As with all the best of Chapman’s works, one moment it will turn your stomach and break you into a cold sweat, the next you’ll be choking on the reveal of a heartbreak. Chapman writes horror at it’s strongest, softest, most empathetic core. No one here is a perfect, flawless parent, but they love with a love that is more than love could have ever imagined itself to be. Madi is a messy, largely irresponsible yet somehow still levelheaded character. Henry is longing made human. The townspeople who make up the supporting cast could be from any small town in the world.
As quickly as he’ll grab your heartstrings, Clay McLeod Chapman is an expert at using an unsuspecting turn of phrase to turn your stomach and give a whole new batch of nightmares. All he needs is the right context. What Kind of Mother is rampant with just as many monstrous fears as human ones. Body horror you never thought to imagine seeps its way through the pages of Mother equally as often as the moral dilemma beating through the novel’s core. The audience-wide joke is a newly developed fear of crabs — and for good reason. They never quite sat right with me before, but if you think I’ll be peacefully traipsing through the river and the beaches after this?
I say there is a moral dilemma at play at the heart of the novel, and it’s true, in a sense. But it also might not be. Who decides how far is too far, after all, when it comes to protecting one’s children?
I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to receive an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. What Kind of Mother is available now wherever books are sold.
