O Mother, Where Art Thou?

A mother who leaves her children is, even today, a figure of dread. No matter how sympathetically portrayed, she represents a rupture in the natural order, a transgression of a potent cultural taboo. Deep-seated anxiety about maternal abandonment permeates an eerie and accomplished work of speculative fiction by Molly Lynch, about a widespread phenomenon of mothers fleeing the family home. For no apparent reason, they slip away for weeks, only to reappear as if nothing had happened, with scant memory of where they’ve been or why.

In the opening chapter, a young couple, Ada and Danny, two academics who teach in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are driving to Canada with their six-year-old son, Gilles. When a naked, feral-looking woman appears at the side of the road, Ada asks Danny to stop the car. She grabs her son’s comfort blanket and follows the stranger over the guardrail, down an...