Wife Shaped Bodies - by Laura Cranehill (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sorrowland meets Manhunt in this literary horror debut in which an isolated newlywed--covered in mushroom growths like all the other wives in her community--strikes a precarious balance between following her husband's strict rules and pursuing an intense connection with a woman who makes her question everything.

Forbidden from leaving her house from girlhood until marriage, Nicole has only her mother's lessons and what she can see from her bedroom window to draw on in forming her view of the world, and of herself. Taught that the mushrooms which cover the women in her village are repulsive and dangerous, she conforms to a rigid set of rules to protect herself and those around her.

When her wedding day arrives, Nicole moves from one prison to another--an empty mansion on the very outskirts of town belonging to the husband she's been promised to since birth. As she haunts the edges of Silas's unknowable life and decaying home, maintaining control over her own transforming body becomes increasingly impossible. And when another wife with rebellious tendencies pays Nicole an unexpected visit, something within her cracks open. Their furtive explorations yield confusing answers, unearthing the long-buried secrets of the generations of resentful brides that came before. Unmoored, angry, and at last awakened, Nicole must reckon with who she really is, and perhaps, give in to what she truly wants.

Raw, visceral, and relentless, Wife Shaped Bodies is an exploration of gender, power, and community through the lens of mycological body horror and an ode to the unsettling beauty of the natural world.

Review Quotes

"Visionary and disconcerting, Wife Shaped Bodies is the work of an undeniable talent."
-Max Gladstone, New York Times bestselling co-author of This is How You Lose the Time War

"Astonishingly beautiful, strange, and haunting, Wife Shaped Bodies is a gorgeous and terrifying ode to the natural world without and within, and what it might mean to forsake manmade communities in search of other ways of entanglement. I loved this defiant work about the dangers of fitting into another's need and the loss and loneliness of being a woman, a mother, a creature that is alive."
-Ling Ling Huang, author of Natural Beauty

"Laura Cranehill is brilliant and has written the best debut novel I've read in years. Wife Shaped Bodies is strange and disturbing, told with forceful, gorgeous prose, and full of terrifying beauty. I keep telling people, you must read this, and when they ask what it's about, I only say, you have to experience this on the page. Cranehill is the writer we've been waiting for."
-Daryl Gregory, author of Spoonbenders and When We Were Real

"Cranehill has crafted a compellingly eerie and heart-breaking tale of a life at the edge, lived for another's benefit, and the glory of finally blooming free, shot through with beautifully weird fungal rot. Reading Wife Shaped Bodies is like living your whole life underwater and finally breaching the surface for a gasp of fresh air. I loved it!"
-Bitter Karella, author of Moonflow

"Wife Shaped Bodies reminds readers of the importance of community and the power of the divine feminine. Cranehill's prose is dense, alive, sticky. She relishes descriptions of fungal appendages and oozy excretions. Reading it is a fever dream."
-Sara Maurer, author of A Good Animal

"Potent, powerful, and grotesque, Wife Shaped Bodies takes the reader on a wild ride into a fungal future that's horrific and yet all-too believable. As it interrogates humanity's relationship to our planet and each other, the novel proves to be a post-apocalyptic fever dream channeling equal parts The Handmaid's Tale and Scavengers Reign. With gorgeous prose and a propulsive story, you have to ask: Are you devouring this novel--or is it devouring you?
-Wendy N. Wagner, author of Girl in the Creek

About the Author

Laura Cranehill is an amalgamation of horrific faceless things who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse and three children. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Strange Horizons, Vastarien, ergot., PANK, and multiple award-winning anthologies. Wife Shaped Bodies is her debut novel.