An Impossibility of Crows

Kaschock (Explain This Corpse) delivers a fiercely unsettling gothic novel that fuses maternal devotion, scientific obsession, and inherited trauma into a narrative as claustrophobic as it is hypnotic. Chemist Agnes Krahn returns to her family’s farmhouse after her father’s death, reentering a family history steeped in silence and folk belief. The narrative plays out through diary entries and Agnes’s late mother’s journals, which eerily echo each other, as Agnes documents an experiment that, in her telling, is both chillingly rational and emotionally fraught: she’s attempting to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes herself has never known. The dread mounts as Agnes’s scientific rigor gives way to fixation, and the crow rapidly evolves not only in size but also in language, cunning, and violence. The book’s fragmented structure, weaving past and present, mother and daughter, and memory and myth, mirrors Agnes’s unraveling psyche in a disorienting but precisely rendered whole. Kaschock uses Agnes’s monstrous experiment to interrogate the thin boundary between care and control, asking whether love can become another form of harm when shaped by unexamined trauma. Readers drawn to literary horror that privileges interiority over spectacle will find this a powerful experience. (Mar.)