Fiction Reviews
Trad Wife
(2026) Sarah Langan, Nightfire, £14.99, trdpbk, 339pp, ISBN 978-1-035-07597-3
Your favourite influencer is about to be exposed. Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the 'trad wife' queen, on her idyllic 300-acre farm. With her handsome husband, seven perfect children, and a life of from-scratch meals, she's an icon of modern femininity. But behind every perfect image is a lie…
Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to uncover the deception behind Mia's curated life. But there's something wrong at the farmhouse. It slithers through Jenny's dreams when the children sing strange nursery rhymes at night. She's losing time. She's losing her hair. She starts to worry that she's losing her mind. There is a horror at the heart of Black Swan, and it's waiting just for Jenny.
Creepy or what? Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife starts with a short prologue set in 2020 as the villagers of Sylvan Village in rural Pennsylvania gather for 'magic hour'. Which consists of a yellow… cloud? Or perhaps, fog? Or something different, something 'other' rising from the earth, and the villagers seemed almost entranced, until a pregnant, filthy, barefoot, distressed woman arrives in their midst, begging for help, wanting them to get whatever is inside of her, out of her. Surely this can’t be Mia Wright? But it is, because here comes her husband, Steadman, in his big fancy car, claiming she is due a rest, and you know how she sleepwalks. She is quickly taken back to the car, and back home, and the villagers don’t really seem to notice at all, such is the power of the yellow… something.
Then we are into the novel proper, with the first of three Acts, this one called 'Trap', to be followed by 'Snap' and 'Clap' as we follow cancelled, journalist Jenny Kaplan who is trying to escape her past decisions and the vile trolls called 'The Brotherhood' who are hounding her by going to Black Swan Farm for seven days to do an interview and expose of trad wife and influencer, Mia Wright. Mia is a domestic goddess, looking after home and family while her husband works. Everything seems as expected, with Mia living a perfect life in a beautiful home, with her loving husband and seven children, but there is something off about the whole thing, as Jenny is about to find out and it is more than strange smelling rooms and children who are slightly creepy underneath the smiling faces. Jenny can sense it, and so can the reader, but Jenny is trapped by her own curiosity and circumstances. Instead of getting away from the farm, she has to stay and dig to the bottom of what is going on, but is she digging her own grave, or worse as her body and mind begins to change?
This is a slow burn of a novel, building on the strangeness and the dread, and if you know anything about horror you might know that the colour yellow features in a story about yellow wallpaper, and there is also a certain King in Yellow, so expect more…yellowness, especially when Mia’s slightly odd children sing songs about a “Mr. Yellow”. Who could that be?
Trad Wife is a mixture of psychological horror, folk horror, small town horror, maybe even cosmic horror with a great sense of place and strong characters, even if some of them are flawed, and Jenny is a wonderfully flawed character that the reader invests in, perhaps too much as the story unfolds. But apart from the above descriptions, Trad Wife is so much more, looking at the role of women, the patriarchy, using children for profit, the immense power of social media, the role of followers, the belief of followers, mental health and self-worth.
While knowing about the phenomenon of the 'trad wife', I wasn’t really aware that it is a literary sub-genre, and Langan’s novel follows in the footsteps of Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer and Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, and while I was reading this, I noticed another two trad wife books being released in the last couple of months; one horror, one not. Given how long it takes to write a novel and for it to be published, I’m sure Langan isn’t jumping on any trad wife bandwagon. Trad Wife starts strange and creepy, and almost thriller-like, until the horror arrives and builds and builds, until… No spoilers here, but if you have read Langan before, you’ll certainly want to read this, and if you’ve dipped your reading toes into the trad wife sub-genre, you’ll also want to read it. Langan is a great writer, and the winner of two Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association for Best Novel including for Audrey's Door (and a third for Best Short Story). Could Trad Wife earn her the Best Novel hat-trick? Watch this space. Recommended.
Ian Hunter
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