Them Crazy Bitches: The Wives

My taste in thrillers runs towards the dark and atmospheric- the more you can skirt the edges of horror and speculative fiction, the better. That means of course that I don't read a whole lot of "domestic thrillers," but something about the description of The Wives pulled me in. Perhaps it's because I was a casual watcher of TLC's Sister Wives, and have a morbid fascination with exactly how polygamy works. So when I saw a thriller with this unusual arrangement at its center, I was curious as to how everything in this fictional setup would fall apart.

The first part of the book, where you're getting a sense of the arrangements, works best. Because there is an inherent tension in Thursday, the main character (whose name you don't discover for quite some time), and her husband Seth, who had two other wives that you don't see. But there's the promise that you will meet these wives, and see if they truly are aware of this secret arrangement (very unlike Sister Wives) as Seth claims they are. That rule of secrecy and separation is what makes it interesting.

But once Thursday reaches out to the other two women, the whole story falls apart. It falls so easily into the old trope of the crazy woman who's invented her own nightmares, but has she really because we still see Seth manipulating her to the point of institutionalization, and something really is going on because the wives are keeping secrets of their own, including that Seth is physically abusive, and and and......

I'm all for convoluted stories. But speaking as a person who devoured Twin Peaks: this story made no goddamned sense. It made less and less sense as it progressed, and it was clear that was done for the sake of endless twists and turns. The problem with that however, was that no one was at the helm: this kind of rabbit-tunnel plot takes a serious amount of planning to execute well, but the book read like Fisher wrote the plot by the seat of her pants without making sure that all her loose ends were tied up. There were some logical inconsistencies in the real world which are never resolved. But of course, it's hard to pinpoint and fix plot holes when your book is deliberately full of them.

This could have been a lot better if the author had exercised a modicum of restraint, and perhaps had inserted some variety into her cast of female characters who all, essentially, had the same flaws of aligning their values to men's perception of them. I get that that's part of the point of this book, but with all characters acting under the same premise, it's hard to differentiate and move the plot forward in a meaningful way. We're not all crazy, after all.

K. Rating: 2/5