Eerie 'Fen' Is Full Of Dazzling, Hard-To-Explain Stories
Daisy Johnson's story collection is set in the marshlands of eastern England — now mostly, catastrophically drained. It's beautifully creepy, hard to explain but easy to read over and over again.
"The land was drained." That's the first sentence in Daisy Johnson's haunting short story collection, Fen, and she wastes no time in establishing a setting. The Fens of eastern England are marshlands — or they were, until the 17th century when Parliament ordered them drained and converted into farmlands. One environmental expert has called the draining of the Fens "England's greatest ecological disaster."
In Johnson's stories, the Fens are haunted, or something
