What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman

​“Mommy fiction” is so popular these days, across genres, that even … um …daddies are jumping on it?
The thing is parenthood is a terrifying concept. It has been explored tritely in a variety of thrillers and brilliantly in some darker, scarier ways like Katrina Monroe’s latest.
And now Clay Chapman in adding to that pile, with a tale of very unconventional mothering of a very unconventional child.
Southern Gothic is nature and tone, this novel is practically swampy with eeriness. A humid sot of a nightmare. The mommy here is Madi, who outside of raising a kid, has never made much of her life after getting knocked up as a teen. Now Madi’s back where she came from, Virginia, getting by on reading palms. Even her daughter has moved on, going to live with her more-situated-in-life dad.
Madi meets an old crush of a hunky fisherman with sad eyes and proceeds to help him try to find his young son, who went missing as an infant.
But if they do find him, what sort of a child would he be? And, perhaps more importantly What Kind of Mother would Madi be to him?
I’m a fan of Chapman’s work, his last two books were very, very good. And this one is noticeably less so. Going by other GR reviews, I’m not in the minority here.
WKoM is wildly uneven and not overly engaging. Chapman is a very good writer, that much is obvious and can be seen in this novel, too. It’s the plotting that drags here. For one thing, there’s barely enough of a plot for an entire 300-page novel. It’s more like one sustained watery nightmare. For another, I didn’t really care for any of the characters. The pacing was slow, but the book read fast, if that makes sense. Lots of dialogue, low word density per page, that sort of thing. And then toward the end, it did that weird thing where every chapter sort of read like the last one, but there was always one more after that. And then when you really thought it was done, there was an epilogue, too.
So overall, not Chapman’s best, regrettably, and mostly worth reading only for the quality of the writing, not the story. Unless you’re really into the smothering mothering experience. Maybe the next one. What kind of a book would that be?