[Book Review] Thin Places (2020)

In Kay Chronister’s debut collection, the final story from which Thin Places takes its title explains, “Thin places are parts of the world where the barrier between clay and the mist is more fragile, where it can be broken . . . Things happen in thin places that can’t happen anywhere else, but they are never safe from getting lost between clay and mist. They are always in-between.” The worlds that Chronister draws tread into the liminal: within their eerie and permeable settings, the characters that populate the eleven stories encounter the monstrous and folkloric underpinnings of our own world. Thin Places takes your hand and invites you into these “in-between” spaces. But watch out—you may not come through the other side quite the same.

Published in 2020 by Undertow Publications, Thin Places garnered Chronister a prestigious Shirley Jackson award nomination. And no wonder: the menacing dealings between neighbors, families, and lovers throughout the collection evoke Jackson’s monumental contributions to the horror genre. Like Jackson and prolific horror writer Elizabeth Engstrom, Chronister explores the complexities of the female psyche. Thin Places foregrounds women—grandmothers, teenage girls, witches—and their difficult positions in society. Even in stories of outlandish demon hunting like “White Throat Holler,” the narrator notes with frankness, “And it turns out they mostly don’t want to know that a few schoolgirls are the only thing standing between their town and the beasts of Hell.” Most often, it’s the relationship between women and girls—specifically relationships between mothers and daughters, and sisters—that present the richest narratives in Thin Places. In Chronister’s amalgamation of Indigenous and Mexican lore, “The Warriors, the Mothers, the Drowned,” Ana carries her sickly baby daughter through the underworld, determined to see them both through—all while hounded by a coyote, the embodiment of death. “If she didn’t have a daughter,” Ana thinks, “she might have a pistol and a will to live instead.” “Roiling and Without Form” conversely considers the lengths a daughter will go to escape the confines of her mother’s suffocating rule. Set in a motel at the edge of a swamp, vicious creatures lurk in the halls. Molly works as a clerk and a jack-of-all-trades for her mother’s suffocating motel, but dreams of escape. At a Cambodian village teeming with ghosts, “The Lights We Carried Home” follows Dara as a Western documentary film crew descends after her sister’s disappearance. In each story, Chronister centers the tug-and-pull between women: close but sometimes too close, passionate and poisonous and inescapable, all wrapped up into one. 

Generational horror likewise features heavily in Thin Places from “The Women Who Sing for Sklep” in which young women are central in a tiny Slavic village’s ritual to the witches of “Too Lonely, Too Wild.” Thin Places, however, is not derivative of Jackson or her modern peer in weird horror, Kelly Link; despite Chronister’s emphasis on small towns and often claustrophobic spaces (or relationships), her luxurious language and apocalyptic plots veer far from Jackson’s sinister mundanity. 

Thin Places is the first page of a deliciously dark career that Chronister is sure to have. The stories’ decadent style is a pleasure and, though sometimes a little too dizzying to grasp with adequate comprehension, the collection portends an exciting new voice in the genre. 

Kay Chronister. Thin Places. Undertow Publications. 2020. ISBN  9781988964188

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