THE STROPHES OF JOB

Two families seek a midwife in Morrissey’s literary novel.

In 1907, in a rural Midwestern village, two women go into labor during a snowstorm. Emma Houndstooth is the only midwife in the area, and both women are desperate to have her by their side. Roberta Frye has sent her daughter, Bitty, out into the deep snow to Houndstooth Farm, but the girl quickly becomes lost in the blizzard. She’s forced to take shelter in the Hollis Woods, a local forest named for the “Hollis children who, decades before, wandered one by one into the unnamed woods until all five were gone, never heard from again.” Meanwhile, Emma—who hasn’t overseen a successful birth in nearly two years—has traveled to the bedside of 16-year-old Sarah Johnson, whose pregnancy is being kept a secret by the rest of her family. Other characters are on the move as well that night: a farmer grieving his declining wife, the coroner forced to store the dead in a shed in winter, and two young men, one of whom may be the father of Sarah’s baby (not to mention a pack of increasingly bold coyotes—and a possible Native American crow-god). As they seek out the midwife and one another, these characters can’t help but disturb their respective pasts, as if leaving footprints in the falling snow. Morrissey’s lyrical prose, which changes its rhythm depending on which character’s head he inhabits, captures the textures and cosmologies of this small, hard world. Here he describes the contents of a farmer’s almanac: “a planting chart aligned with the zodiac, the many uses of a poultice made from Indian mint and reduced goat urine, how to predict the weather with a pig’s spleen, the best broths for earache, how to use an ox skull to intensify the light from a bullseye lantern.” This is a ghost story that changes shape as often as its ghosts do, and patient readers will enjoy every permutation.

A snowy gothic tale of life, death, and birth.