The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Publisher – Tordotcom

Published – out now

Price – £16.99 hardback £8.99 Kindle eBook

"Mothers fly away like migrating birds. This is why farmers have daughters." A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it's been just the three of them--her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed. Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children's lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

Some fairy stories do give us warnings – beware the wolf and perhaps that is the animal the village feared and sometime sits a man’s dark side being revealed. Be wary of marrying Bluebeard. The cautionary aspect of a story to teach us lessons. In Kelly Barnhill’s powerfully thought-provoking horror fantasy novella The Crane Husband we have a tale of a small family where an intruder in the shape of a menacing crane takes charge and yet while I think it creates an absorbing story it is also one that makes you rethink exactly how far we have come in dealing with issues of domestic violence.

A mother and her two children live in mid-western farmstead. The mother creates art and they struggle to pay bills. The eldest daughter takes charge of administration selling the art and doing lots of other tasks including looking after her very young brother. One day the mother brings a Crane home; announces they should call it father and then over the next few weeks the family is turned upside down. The daughter decides to investigate and decide what to do about this dangerous intruder.

I have a very mixed reaction to this story. On the weird horror side, I really appreciated the strange horror Barnhill creates where the Crane arrives wearing a hat and sling and starts to take over, eating the family pets, physically abusing the mother and making her stay away from her children both mentally and physically as she is locked away on a new piece of unseen art. Barnhill captures the sense of a family being menaced and violated and the confusion and helplessness a child can feel. The story weaves in the legend of the crane wife, the idea that this family comes from a long line of cases where the mother ‘flies away’ and we get dark hints domestic abuse have been in this family for a long time.  There is a feeling the cycle has started again with the crane’s arrival and now the eldest daughter needs to decide how best to take action and keep her family alive. The ending is haunting, worrying ambivalent at what happened and casts a long shadow that you’ll be thinking about.

The issue that slightly troubled me and then weirdly troubled me about why I’m troubled is my reaction to how the daughter reacts. She decides to play truant, takes on more family duties and ignore opportunities to get help from outside agencies when her mother is being physically attacked and her family is in danger. Instead, this ends in gunfire and even then, the story doesn’t really give anyone a happy ending. Half of me is going in 2024 is this the message we want to promote – the need to get help and intervene….

But then I refreshed my memory on UK statistics from last year – 1 in five people will have domestic violence in their lifetimes, 2.4 million people had domestic violence against them last year and that has gone up 7.7% on the previous year. I keep thinking things are getting better but perhaps I should remember that we are still a long way from resolving this problem. Perhaps the daughter knows underfunded social services can’t really adequately intervene, and could ake things worse for her family? Perhaps this is still sadly the only way for them to try and move on and the bleak ending is a reminder why we should as a community do better? That’s a different type of horror and sadly one without a magical solution.

Initially I read The Crane Husband and thought really well executed and yet unsure the message works. Then it gets in your head and does that dangerous thing stories do – make you think, investigate and see the world through another person’s eyes and that for me means it is a very good story indeed and this chilling tale. Horror is designed to provoke and challenge us and this does it extreme well. I strongly recommend!