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Cannibalistic Crabs and Missing Children

Author: Clay McLeod Chapman

Madi Price claims that she can read your future in the palm of your hand, but she really reads your needs, your emotions. Consider her a cheap therapist. A well-meaning liar, barely making ends meet, back in the hometown she forsook, trying to stay involved in her adult daughter’s life. Her daughter, however, is more interested in her father, who after years of abandonment has suddenly found religion, an ideal family, and is sanctimoniously perfect. It seems that Madi doesn’t have much to offer anyone anymore, and so she offers hope under the blanket of mysticism, her neon sign glowing from a cheap hotel room into the night.

Then Henry McCabe comes back into her life, looking for a reading, which suddenly sends them both on a quest for answers. Henry’s infant sone, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Henry’s beloved wife committed suicide the same day. But Henry is sure Shyler is out there, somewhere, alive, and for the first time when Madi touches someone’s palm, she sees something. Is this old flame a killer in denial? A broken recluse who cannot accept his loss? Or is something else far stranger going on in this bayou town with its heat, its crab trawling, and its gossipy secrets?

I first discovered Clay McLeod Chapman through Ghost Eaters, a book club read that I loved so much, I immediately went and bought the hardcover after listening to the Audible version. It’s a book I’ll need to read again, both for its intuitive insight into grief and the complicated relationships among broken people and its creepy surrealism. The entire book is like a trip – beauty turning to terror turning back to beauty. What Kind of Mother has echoes of this mastery, with its lyricism and body horror grotesqueness that is tied into the nearby river with its teaming, molting, cannibalistic crabs. But, despite Chapman’s undeniable literary talent, the story falls flat, even if the words and the aura stay bizarrely beautiful.

Image by Artie_Navarre from Pixabay

Neither of the characters pull at us much. Madi is merely ok – engendering a kind of lazy empathy from the reader, but by the time we meet her, her personality has faded into survival mode. She slogs through the days in her dreary hotel, dashes her own dreams before anyone else can, and much of the verve of her existence is gone through necessity. It’s hard to connect with her because the life of the character has long since left. And Henry . . . well, we don’t trust him. He is altogether too unreliable to latch onto, and his emotive grief could be real, or could be a total front. By the time we know what happened – or sort of maybe happened – we’re beyond connecting with the characters.

This is partly through the character’s own choices, which start consistent but suddenly swerve, both Madi and Henry doing a 180 with no explanation. It destroys the story’s already tottering sense of cohesiveness. We’re expected to believe this transition. This sudden, deus ex machina “twist?” What is the basis? What is the evidence?

In the end, the answers themselves are poorly explained. The author tries to keep some of the mystery intact, but it backfires. What is this . . . creature that Henry and Madi are protecting, claiming to be the missing Skyler? Where did it come from? What does it want? How is it possible? The characters jump to conclusions that are given to us as proof, but it’s a leap without logic, one we must accept, but nevertheless, one with holes like a Swiss cheese.

In the end, it just gets both weirder and more banal. The only true storyline, the only cohesion, is a strange connection to crabs that never makes sense beyond the fact that Henry had an idea once upon a time to farm blue crabs. It’s all very fever dreamy. In the end, I was glad It was finished. I was both bored and tired of the book and its artsy pretensions. This one, sadly, was a complete miss for me.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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