The story actually centers around two female characters. Jenny Kaplan, is a struggling journalist working for a TMZ-like magazine, Bread and Circuses, in New York. Taking a half day on her birthday, she writes a long-form essay about her experiences during the COVID lockdown, when her fiance had a serious mental breakdown, causing Jenny to choose an abortion for fear of being stuck in a rapidly deteriorating situation. The piece she writes, titled Drain-o, soon sweeps her up in instant fame. A movie will be made, she's been invited to several mainline literary events, her online followers triple. But then a troll, using the handle “DirtyGarry” begins to taunt her. He is part of a group calling itself “The Brotherhood for the American Agenda” and so startling are their cancel tactics that Jenny's fame comes crashing down in seconds. Fearing the brutality of the online backlash and possible retaliation, the magazine lets her go.
Devastated, she flounders, and, fearing for her life she hunkers down at home. Grudgingly, she visits her younger sister in New Jersey for her nephew's first birthday and is introduced to a host of extremely put-together moms, all of whom are fascinated by an online tradwife influencer called Mia Wright, the second main female character, who is a traditional mother and wife living an idealized life in Sylvan Village, near Erie, PA.
Jenny sees through the Instagram perfection and generic evangelical pronouncements on Mia's reels, but she soon becomes fascinated herself, because she sees an opportunity to dismantle the fad by writing a freelance piece about how fake it all really is and how deadly to women.
Jenny submits the proposal to her former boss, and is granted access to Mia at her home on Black Swan Farm. More than just an influencer gig, Black Swan is a growing internet business and Jenny soon discovers that the Wright family owns the trademark on a host of cherry-flavored and scented beauty products as a cover for a multi-level marketing scheme. Interviewing Black Swan sales ambassadors, Jenny discovers that they are going into extreme debt to keep their part of the franchise, and a distant association with Mia alive.
At Black Swan farm, Jenny finds a too-perfect house, run by a too-perfect woman. The chore chart is always full of stars, Stedman, Mia's too-handsome husband is adoring and hardworking. But Jenny starts noticing odd things.
Mia injures herself in almost every video; a burn, a cut, or one of her seven children is accidentally knocked down or burned—in one case the second-youngest boy gets lye in his eye during a soap-making video. Mia, hugely pregnant, seems oblivious to the injuries because she is so swept up by her own image and online popularity. Jenny senses danger, suspecting that Mia might be held captive by a misogynistic ideology. At the end of her brief visit, Jenny is accosted by Mia, outside the too-perfect house, where she begs Jenny to help her. Jenny's suspicions are reinforced.
Jenny tries to write a hit piece, but is soon invited to stay a full week at Black Swan, before jumping to unfair conclusions, for a “Freaky Friday” experience of Mia's life. Jenny's boss offers her an even sweeter deal if she takes the opportunity and so, hoping this will shut down DirtyGarry for good and end her time as a troll target, she hires a rental and drives to Black Swan Farm for one week of living in Mia's shoes.
Things begin almost immediately to veer off the tracks. Within a few days, Jenny experiences several startling events that are too difficult to process. Although Mia continues to post a video per day, everyone on the farm gets sick with a bad case of strep throat. The horses are sick. The chickens are dying. The seemingly perfect children's rooms are disasters. There are horrible smells in her room and the house starts to feel as though it is swallowing her. As the blurb says, “Jenny is losing time. And her hair”. Black Swan's popular cherry-flavored and scented products infuse everything, as does a mysterious yellow fog that rises up from the ground.
Jenny steps in more and more to keep the kids and the house in order, further cementing the “Freaky Friday” bit. As the days pass, Stedman, Mia's husband, mistakes Jenny for his wife. Jenny herself feels like she is caught in a slowly constricting web. By the end of the week, her desire to escape is second only to the desire to save the children, especially Victoria, the eldest teen, for whom Jenny has an affinity.
She makes several attempts to escape, but is thwarted by a seemingly impermeable net of family and Mia supporters. At every turn, Jenny feels the pressure and attention of Mr. Yellow, a being hinted at both by the kids and by a strange slithering thing in her dreams that her mind will not let her acknowledge fully.
Spoilers
Trad Wife is, as I said, a seething attack on the growing popularity of the wife and mom who does everything in submission to her husband, for the good of her family, citing Christian ideals as her motivation, while posting it all online. Real tradwife influencers are exceedingly disturbing to watch unless the romance overwhelms the irony for the viewer. I looked up the term on YouTube and was shocked and slightly disgusted by what I saw. Any one of them could have been Mia Wright as she is described in the book. I found myself searching past the influencer to look at the background for signs of slithering things.
Langan makes the irony stark against the backdrop of the modern movement of female empowerment, especially the suggestion that the tradwife is the ultimate example of female freedom. Thus, as the story proceeds, we watch Mia devolve from the perfect wife and mom, with the perfect house and family, to a physically and spiritually unwell woman, unable to keep the pace. Along with that, Jenny witnesses that Stedman isn't so much the epitome of the masculine as a sexually overcharged moron, desperate to keep his wife, even if he doesn't know exactly which woman that is. This is a harsh nod to the biblical trend of women being chattel rather than free individuals, shepherded by rough and uncouth men.
Behind it all, though, is Mr. Yellow, Langan's nod at Robert W. Chambers's novel, The King in Yellow, presides over the realm of Carcosa. Jenny finds that the cherry-flavored products, the strange smell in her room, the dripping walls, the strangely hypnotized children, the mental lethargy and collapsing scenery all tend toward that one name as source of the bleak reality of Black Swan Farm.
As you may have guessed, Jenny becomes an unwilling replacement for Mia both as wife of Stedman (he never notices the switch) and as surrogate mother to the children. She also becomes a vessel for Mr. Yellow, who releases Mia and takes over Jenny's life. Jenny succumbs to a cookie-cutter version of Mia and several others before her. If Jenny will submit to Mr. Yellow completely, she will receive massive power, and when he tires of her, she will live forever as a witch, first tasked to find her own replacement, and then free to use her power for her own gain.
After a series of attempted escapes, in which Langan perpetrates the age-old trick of dangling freedom before yanking it away, Jenny eventually makes a deal with Mr. Yellow: her own soul for the promise that Victoria can go free. The demon thing agrees and Jenny becomes Mia fully. The stroke of horror genius at the end, is that everything in Jenny's life, her boyfriend losing his mind, the Brotherhood of the American Agenda and DirtyGarry all originated at Black Swan Farm, perpetrated by the Wright family to hook Jenny as the replacement for Mr. Yellow's devious pantomime that allows him to gain more power, cause more pain and create more children followers. Jenny adds to Mr. Yellow's long line of children for five years and then, the cycle begins again.
Final thoughts
I said at the beginning, that Langan fills her devastating book with scathing rebukes. What I did not say was how generous she is with her criticism. Although Jenny Kaplan feels like the hero of the story, Langan does not spare her author's rod. It isn't just Jenny's lapse into victimhood at the hands of misogynistic basement dwellers online (possibly a nod to the Proud Boys, but any carbon copy group would do). She is a deeply opinionated person, who is—even so—helpless in her own affairs. Her pieces are part of the “take down” culture, in which criticism is leveled at the targets of her articles, but her own life barely reaches anything approaching the ideals that she professes.
When Mia enters Jenny's sights, she plans a takedown of epic proportions, but her life is in such devastation that she cannot even empathize with Mia, only seeing her as a social problem to be pulled apart, or if possible, rescued. By the time she realizes her mistake, she has become the victim, even failing to get Victoria out, except by making a deal with Mr. Yellow and losing her own freedom.
But Langan's rebuke stretches out, smashing cancel culture, trolls, online lifestyle influencers, multi-level marketing schemes, hereditary cycles of subduing and controlling women, body shaming, quiverful doctrines, and the vile poison of social media which spreads the worst of us to every corner of the planet.
More than anything, though, Langan's work reminded me of the horrific cults that have so often been in the news. Rows of young women in photos, their hair in braids and wearing prairie dresses, the lines between sister, wife and daughter blurred by a handful of pious loonies, like the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, as run from prison by polygamous Warren Jeffs. It also made me think of the now disgraced Duggar family, of the reality show genre, which we learned some years later, was rotting with sexual abuse and incest.
In a deftly constructed parody of such cults, the Wright home has a deeply unsettling feeling to it underneath the idealized perfection, in Langan's horror, but the tradwife fad she describes is no less horrific in real life and deserves its criticism.
Jenny is right to be horrified by what she sees, both by the apparent perfection, the multiple injuries and the subsequent devolution inside the Wright home. The buildings are all falling down, The kids are treated like animals, Stedman is given total authority, but his behavior is more and more avoidance-based. His brothers support him utterly, acting as physical representations of the self-reinforcing patriarchal power maintenance at the expense of the women and children in the system. The dichotomy between what viewers see and the truth is not just a construct for Langan's Mr. Yellow, it is a searing commentary on the nature of tradwife influencer culture.
While I love stories with untrustworthy narrators (I will always cite Jade Daniels from Stephen Graham Jones's Angel of Indian Lake trilogy here) Langan goes a step farther, making Jenny a victim and a little too disoriented to make solid decisions even on an endangered teen girl's behalf. Comparison may be the thief of joy, but Jenny sees no joy in her own life and wants to disrupt the apparent self delusion of others to make herself feel better, and to justify her own ambivalence. Thus, her poetic destruction is assured. She is no different from DirtyGarry, but she justifies her own position with the same closed-minded antics, until she falls afoul of her own kind of writing.
There are some nice moments, especially between Jenny and her younger sister. Yet Jenny is irredeemably indecisive and deluded and her inner dialog, through a third-person omniscient narrator, shows that she doesn't take much ownership of her own life's most challenging problems.
The Jury's Out
While for most horror readers I would suggest this book heartily, this isn't a general recommendation for just everyone. The graphic description of Jenny's abortion will definitely feel disquieting to most readers, despite how kindly she is treated during the process. Her slow absorption into Mr. Yellow's clutches can be triggering, especially for readers, like me, who had some remaining hope for Jenny's escape from a closed system. I felt claustrophobic more than once as I read and had at least three dreams of being back in church.
Langan constructs Black Swan Farm as an evangelical tradwife cult, which is accurate, at least in the language used to describe Mia's willing submission to a dominant power. But her best trick is showing that language in a closed system can be misleading. For her viewers it appears innocent, devotional, even purely Christian. Jenny finds that the devotion is directed not at God but at Mr. Yellow, but the terms of the devotion—and the submission and bondage—do not change.
More than anything, though, Black Swan Farm, with all its deeply pious facade, but clearly hiding something nefarious, will strike at anyone who has escaped such a system. Despite the innocent and harmless, even charming appearance, these ideologies are deadly to those within.
This book had me thinking of all the people who visit Lancaster County's Amish Country. They arrive full of blithe condescension to witness the alternate lifestyle, familiar only with the saccharine Amish inspirational literature so popular among Christians. Upon too close a viewing, though, they discover that within the realm of the quaint Amish community, is an iron-clad system in which unspeakable horrors occur and are perpetrated mostly against females by the men in charge. Some females do escape, sometimes after enduring years of sexual abuse, losing contact with their siblings and cousins; the price of their freedom. Such sights are not for the faint of heart, but they are no less true and forbidding.
Read Langan's masterpiece, therefore, with caution. Mr. Yellow will certainly try to lure you into his cherry-scented nightmare and the only way out is through submission.
