The mother and daughter, who share an invented vocabulary, called it the “Bonak”, which is at the same time a word for everything which frightens. This creature supposedly lives at the bottom of the river and snatches animals and children. While piecing together his story, hoping it will lead her to her mother, Gretel navigates a monster of her childhood that may not have just been fantasy. Having once being called Margot, he ran away from his adoptive parents, and began living as a boy. Charismatic, Sarah had a habit of accruing people. "A person can convince themselves of anything out here." Gretel, the narrator, retraces the rivers where she grew up searching for her mother Sarah, who abandoned her as a teenager. People "who grow up around water are different to other people," we are told. In her Booker longlisted novel Everything Under, Johnson reimagines a landscape of rivers. The stories weren't supernatural or magical realist, but rather paranormal in the way of everyday superstition: startling because they felt familiar, the sort of stories we all grew up with but that hadn't yet been wrought in very modern literary prose. Vampiric women preyed on men from dating sites. The inhabitants of her liminal East Anglia fenland setting had something otherworldly about them. In 2016 British writer Daisy Johnson published Fen, a short story collection that felt very modern while reaching back into an indeterminate, earthy and murky folk tradition.
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