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I’m always on the lookout for novels that relate to the past in a way that surprises me. Recently I read or re-read three books that engaged with the idea of bog bodies, the mummified human remains found with some frequency in the anaerobic environments of bogs. I wanted to think about them together, so here are my capsule reviews. (I could have included Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss as well, but I already wrote about that one!)

The Bog Queen by Anna North

This book tells the parallel tales of a druid in Roman-era Britain and the forensic anthropologist called to investigate when her preserved body is discovered in a bog 2,000 years later. I cannot tell you how quickly I clicked “preorder” when I read that description. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the actual book.

North experiments with a few different tonal registers, including the timeless, mythological voice of the bog moss; the dreamy, detached voice of forensic anthropologist Agnes; and the presumptuous yet anxious voice of the young druid growing into her new role as a community leader in a tumultuous political time. I liked the moss parts the best, and the druid parts the least. North gives the druid a thoroughly modern voice and perspective on the world—she often seems more of the 21st century than Agnes—which I was open to until being overwhelmed by an avalanche of anachronisms. (The use of the phrase “selling yourself short,” by a person who only recently encountered money for the first time, continues to haunt me.) Instead of making the druid startlingly relatable, as I think was the intent, her overly modern affect makes her seem like a person who never could have existed, inhabiting a past world it then becomes difficult to trust is solidly constructed. The bog body itself is used to explore contemporary ideas of crime and murder—and later, environmental conservation—rather than any of the thrillingly unfamiliar value systems a true engagement with the past might have asked readers to grapple with.

On the other hand, I blew through The Bog Queen in three days, and part of me enjoyed being annoyed by it. Sometimes that’s all you need.

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

If you read the above and thought, that mythological moss voice sounds cool, please allow me to direct you to The Bog Wife. It starts off as a fairy tale that gradually reveals itself to be a nightmare and then moves back into fairy tale, following a year in the lives of the latest and perhaps last generation of Haddesleys, an isolated family in West Virginia that has devoted themselves to caring for, and being cared for by, the bog they live beside.

That exchange of care revolves around the most thrillingly unfamiliar value system there is, and one with a long relationship to bogs: Human sacrifice. For centuries, the Haddesleys have exchanged their dying, but not quite dead, patriarchs for the next in a series of wives formed from and delivered by the bog. It’s a creepy and evocative take on the tradition of bog bodies and beliefs in a reciprocal relationship to a fragile, liminal environment, while also providing a satisfying twist on the assumed sanctity of the ancient and traditional. For in The Bog Wife, the sacrifice is ultimately revealed to be worse than unnecessary, and in fact actively harmful to both the people who practice it and the ecosystem they believe requires it. The horror story of The Bog Wife turns out to be colonialism, and how its foundation of exploitation makes true care impossible.

The Searcher by Tana French

I try not to spoil too much plot in my reviews, but this one requires it, so if you don’t want The Searcher’s mystery solved, stop reading here and come back after you’ve read the book (which should only take a few days because it’s Tana French).

The first book in a planned trilogy (last one out in March!), The Searcher follows Cal Hooper, a Chicago police detective who retires to rural Ireland and immediately gets in over his head in a community he doesn’t understand with a capacity for violence he doesn’t recognize. Cal reluctantly, and unofficially, ends up investigating the recent disappearance of Brendan Reddy, a clever ne’er-do-well who, we eventually learn, had ambitions to start a meth lab, thereby bringing the dark heart of the drug trade to a town that wouldn’t be able to withstand it. Before things can go too far, the town’s older men cooperate to accidentally-on-purpose kill Brendan and bury his body in a bog. When Cal demands to see the body seven months later, Brendan is almost perfectly preserved, “lashes lying on his cheeks like he’s sleeping.”

French’s work has long, if lightly, engaged with archaeology and the idea of an inescapable but unknowable past, and the bog body revelation at the end of The Searcher lands with the perfect blend of inevitability and uncanniness. Brendan is the latest person in the bog to be sacrificed so that his community may survive, making that old, unfamiliar value system thrillingly familiar and relevant again.