The Changeling

The Changeling is a 2017 fantasy horror novel by Victor LaValle. Synopsis Apollo Kagwa is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting signs of post-partum depression, but it becomes clear that her troubles go beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent's comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air. Thus begins Apollo's journey through an enchanted world to find his wife. Reception In a review of The Changeling in Locus magazine, American author John Langan wrote that there is "a deep humanity" in The Changeling that remains with you long after finishing it. He said several authors, including Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King and Peter Straub have explored how people respond to horror, and LaValle makes "a significant contribution to this tradition" in The Changeling. Langan said this is a fairy tale, but not the traditional "sanitized [and] moralistic" tale: it "flips the script of so many narratives of the fantastic" and draws instead on Scandinavian folklore. American film critic Terrence Rafferty said The Changeling is a "strange and wonderful new novel". Writing in The New York Times, he called the book a "rambunctious fairy-tale epic", but of the "old kind" where there are no "happily ever after" endings. Rafferty said LaValle periodically shatters the readers' "happily-ever-after reverie" with horrors and catastrophes, and the truth "about the anxieties and ambivalences of modern parenting, the psychological value of the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and the rigors of survival in urban America." Rafferty stated that many of the characters in The Changeling are descendants of immigrants, and the novel is "rich in the ambiguous history of [New York City] ... [and] its noisy, clamorous setting."