If you pick up a horror novel called Trad Wife, you immediately have an idea of what you’re about to get, and that’s exactly the point. The latest book from multi-Stoker-winner Sarah Langan is designed, from the outside, to evoke a certain vibe, a certain dissection of a common internet phenomenon.
Indeed, as the book begins, that’s exactly what we get, but it’s not the only thing we get. Lean, brisk, and wrapped in near-constant tension, Trad Wife is a masterclass in delivering on a book’s promise while also exploring the depths of the unexpected. Even thematically, this is a book that’s willing to probe the obvious while also reaching further, and its ability to do both masterfully makes it one of the year’s best horror novels.
Jenny Kaplan is a writer in need of a break. After years spent writing thankless listicles finally paid off in the form of a runaway hit confessional essay about life with her ex-boyfriend, she’s been let go from her job at a New York-based lifestyle magazine and left adrift, internet-famous but somehow still broke and jobless. So when her editor offers her the chance to earn one last hefty payday by doing a feature about a popular Tradwife influencer, Jenny reluctantly takes the job.
But despite the traditional values espoused by her content, Mia Wright isn’t just another influencer in the family space. From her family farm in rural Pennsylvania, Mia has built an empire of hit videos, lifestyle products, and a multi-level marketing platform allowing her followers to not just love her, but work for her, even as the constant stream of inventory makes them go broke. Jenny thinks she has Mia pegged even before she arrives at the Wright family farm.
Mia, it turns out, is more than the subtle tells of orchestration lurking in her carefully curated image. What starts as a single interview soon turns into a weeklong stay at the farm, and the more time Jenny spends with Mia, her husband, and her many children, the more at home she feels, even when she gets desperate to escape.
This all starts in a very familiar place, a set of tropes stretching through horror history in everything from The Stepford Wives to The Wicker Man and beyond. It begins with something that seems too good to be true: A woman genuinely happy in her life as a mother, homemaker, and content creator, without any apparent emotional baggage or artifice. The more Jenny sticks around, the more artifice she uncovers, whether it’s issues with Mia’s teenage daughter or the strange history of the near-abandoned town Mia’s business has helped to revive.
We follow Jenny as she picks at these scabs, searching for what lies beneath, and it’s undeniably compelling. Langan knows how to write the most conventional version of this story, so even as she’s laying out the ingredients for her own spin on the tropes, she’s delivering on what we’d expect to find here. If she stuck to the formula for the entire length of the book, it would be familiar, but it would also be undeniably entertaining.
The real brilliance of Trad Wife, though, is that Langan doesn’t stick to the formula, even as she refuses to abandon it entirely. The expected scares, the terror lingering beneath a beautifully structured surface, arrive right on time, effective and creepy and oddly comforting in their familiarity. They’re juxtaposed, then, with the more uncomfortable stuff, the things Jenny would rather avoid. She wants to write a story about a fucked-up tradwife and her fucked-up social media empire, not find a strange kinship with Mia or fall in love with Mia’s kids. She doesn’t want to be absorbed in Mia’s life or feel at home on the farm or seek common ground with these people.
And yet, as the story twists and turns through discovery and epiphany, that’s exactly what happens. Mia and Jenny, after all, are both women who are very good at their jobs, battling expectations and institutional misogyny and the constant need to craft a persona in order to succeed. In other words, they are both storytellers, and when they butt heads, it’s often because their narratives both match. The tension this creates, even as the story barrels toward its folk and cosmic horror-tinged conclusion, is positively addictive.
It also means that Trad Wife can gracefully, seamlessly walk the line between the expected and the jaw-dropping. Langan has somehow written a book that’s simultaneously exactly what you might predict and like nothing else you’ll read this year, a beautifully layered nightmare that’s somehow timely and timeless. Don’t miss this book.
Trad Wife is now available wherever you get your books.
