Savage Landscapes and Ecogothic Defiance: A Review of Daisy Johnson’s Fen

Unlike books that use geography as a mere backdrop, Daisy Johnson’s debut story collection, Fen (2016), lets the landscape crawl inside its characters skin. Strikingly immune to pastoral complacency, the book blends visceral body horror, unyielding weirdness, and rural subcultures to deliver both gothic dread and radical female autonomy. Having loved the haunted, architectural containment of her later book, Hotel, I read Fen simply chasing that same spark of uncanny brilliance; she absolutely delivered.

The collection bypasses standard plotting and linear arcs for provocative, aesthetic shock value. At its heart is the landscape, brought to electric life by Johnson's raw, magnetic prose. Yet, looking closely at the environment's actions reveals that it is no passive champion of scenery. Instead, it acts as a predatory, manipulative tyrant rooted entirely in total control, forcing the inhabitants to adapt to its wet, domestic logic.

This dynamic peaks in the standout opening story, Starver. Johnson begins with a historical vignette about the draining of the wetlands, where the local workers find themselves starving when the native eels stubbornly refuse to eat. The narrative then pivots into the modern day, following a teenager named Katy who announces her sudden intention to stop eating altogether. What follows is not a standard contemporary descent into anorexia; rather, the act of self-deprivation interacts with the fenland landscape to trigger an astonishing bodily transformation.

As Katy wastes away into little more than skin and bone, she begins to take on literal, glistening eel-like characteristics. Her sister and narrator, Suze, is left to navigate this unsettling metamorphosis, watching Katy slip across the floors on her belly and helping her breathe in bowls of water. Through deliberate physical degradation and ecological magic, Johnson seduces vulnerable characters and readers alike. In modern literary terms, these encounters represent a paradoxical form of eco-gothic defiance. By slipping into the river at the end, Katy transforms the landscape's harsh tyranny into a dark, primal, and terrifyingly liberating awakening.

Ultimately, the text treats its strange creations not as static victims, but as active psychological participants. At its climax, the collection attempts a narrative pivot. It asks the reader to sympathise with these broken, transforming entities, reframing them as tragic, misunderstood romantics who are simply too beautiful for a harsh, dry world. It is an unsettling, brilliant trick that firmly establishes Johnson as a master of contemporary weird fiction.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/431979/fen-by-daisy-johnson/9781784702106