If you were duped by what Yesteryear had promised and failed to deliver, Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife is the redemption arc. You might be thinking it is just another trad wife influencer horror, but the supernatural folklore aspect of it, gives the plot the much-needed oomph.

Read Full Review of Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke here.

Eerie atmosphere, creepy characters and a sinister plot, the book has it all. The book even got endorsement from Stephen King as the best horror book of 2026. So why did I not particularly like it?

Let’s get into it.

Plot of “Trad Wife” by Sarah Langan: What is the new horror sensation book about?

Jenny Kaplan is stuck in her journalism career. So, she writes a deeply personal piece. It works, it works out very well, millions of views, praise from the boss. Untill it doesn’t. Jenny has written about her mentally ill boyfriend, living with him during the pandemic and the abortion she got after his parents finally took him away to get him the help he needs.

Now, the piece and Jenny have haters. The Brotherhood, a conservative group, is harassing her online, giving her death threats. While the situation is serious, there can be no action taken against the group. Instead, the hate gets to the point that the magazine she works for, and the boss she thinks is well-meaning, lets Jenny go. She still thinks Milton is in her corner when he offers her a freelance position instead.

Her first piece is on Mia Wright of Black Swan Farm. Mia is one of the most popular of the trad wife influencers, she has a made-from-scratch brand for her videos and products for the business. Her subscribers are not growing. She wants Jenny to write a feature about her and the farm. She has become a fan of Jenny after reading her popular piece, Drano, and insomuch as they are the opposites of each other, Mia wants to convince Jenny of her lifestyle and have the world read about it.

So, Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm. She has questions about Mia, especially about all the small accidents she keeps manufacturing for her videos. But there is a lot more sinister things going on at this isolated farm. Jenny is convinced about the hit-piece she is going to write for the feature and shatter the business, untill Mia is on her knees in the mud, begging for her help, begging her to come back for a week-long stay at the farm and do a sort of Freaky Friday where Jenny tries out Mia’s life for a day and writes about it.

The place where the farm is has morbid history of violence. Sylvan Village was a site of a battle where the bodies were left to rot. While that added a component to the soil creates a yellow haze, it is supposed to be non-toxic. Six Trappers came to the village to settle there after it was inhabitable again. They paid to have daughters from nearby tribes delivered to them for wives. One of them, Corrie, came willingly.

Corrie Wright, a Carcosan witch, was burnt at the stake for inheriting her husband’s property and refusing to let the men in the family control her fortune further. While being burnt alive, she had cursed the village to the tune of something like no woman will have autonomy, and no man will be competent. She was the daughter of Mr. Yellow, the devil, a traveler, stuff of nightmares from folklore. Her curse gave Mr. Yellow permission to enter the houses of the six families, the six widows of which were already dead by then. Now, Sylvan Village is his domain.

Black Swan Farm still has one of the original walls from the 1660s. And there’s a bad thing slithering in the shadows.

During Jenny’s week-long stay, she gets acquainted with the husband, Steadman Wright, and all seven kids. She can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with all of them.

My Verdict: Should you read Sarah Langan’s “Trad Wife”

Sure, it’s a good book. However, it might not be worth the level of hype it has garnered.

The social media loves a book about social media. So, no wonder the internet’s newest horror sensation is about itself. But I cannot even agree if it was horror per se. A feminist thriller with a side of supernatural, sure.

The book asks good questions and raises some pertinent concerns. Abusive partners, mental health issues, oppression of women, bodily autonomy, internet troll culture and eldritch horror are some of the pillars for this narrative. Why are we using one woman to tear down another woman because their lifestyles and beliefs differ from each other? Isn’t this patriarchy tearing us apart from the inside out? Why doesn’t Jenny go after The Brotherhood? Is it the death of real journalism if oligarchs blatantly control what is published and who is critised? All valid questions. The thing is none of them are new and at the end of the day, the premise of this book might be too limited to address them. So, the readers are left with microdosing these important questions. It almost felt like the book did not have the patience to see a thought through. Then, there’s the fact that the plot was entirely too predictable.

Jenny’s traumatic past with her ex-boyfriend, Jarron Stills, is given a lot of space in the narrative to explain her character and the choices she makes but considering Jenny was given the personality of a doormat without any character arc, I did not see the need for that much detail into her life.

I would read a book about how Jarron weaponised his mental health issues against Jenny and her struggles in dealing with him alone in the middle of the pandemic. Her coming to terms with her own boundaries and limitations when she finally calls his parents to take him away. And later, when Jenny publishes Drano, Jarron coming at her for exposing him and not telling him she got the abortion. If that was the whole book’s premise, a women’s fiction (god, I hate that term), I would read it. The part about coming from a broken home and raising her sister alone and then, distancing herself from said sister to finally live her life was a nice touch.

If the book was about an investigative journalist finding out the sinister things going on at the trad wife influencer farm, it would be great. There is something in the water, there is something in the soil, Mia knows that and she is selling her products to people with no regard for their well-being. The business is actually a pyramid scheme and the ambassadors to her program are all in serious debt. That would have been an all-right book, nothing new, but sure, all-right book.

There is rich cultural history that is bloody and violent where the victims were mostly women in this middle-of-nowhere village would also be a good story. The curse of a supposed witch that wipes out the village from generation to generation and there’s one Mia Wright standing between total annihilation and thriving life. This would have been the story I liked the best among all three narratives.

But the problem is that Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife is all 3 of these stories.

The horror supernatural element is not written well to actually be scary in itself. Mr. Yellow takes control of people, he prefers women. Then you are in the backseat of your mind and he is controlling your words, actions and expressions. He needs you to spread the word, get more people infected. Mia has chosen the path of becoming an influencer, spread the word of God. But she really is spreading Mr. Yellow’s influence through the products she is selling. This story is sinister, no doubt.

The meek husband who believes he is the paragon of virtue, and he is saving his wife and this haunting is actually hysteria is lore accurate. But I am tired of these character archetypes being hot. Think Mr. Rochester. Jane thought he was hot despite being objectively ugly. Steadman is farmer hot. It kind of takes away from the blatant abuse and tries to justify submitting to him whims. We don’t get to see what the real Mia would have thought of Steadman but Jenny cannot stop gushing over how attractive he is and more.

Then there is the fact that the story is using two of women’s biggest fears as the horror element of the book: losing bodily autonomy and unwanted pregnancies. I will give you a little spoiler (actually a big one, skip this paragraph, but come back after you read the book), the women who are the victims of this horror, accept their lot in life. There is no revenge, there is no consequences. I am not saying the only acceptable horror is jump scares and a man in a mask chasing a woman with a knife, I am saying the social critique didn’t land when it is other women procuring the next female victim as sacrifice without the husband knowing about the haunting at all. She is given powers of immortality, to control her appearance (what else is more important to women) and to pause situations that aren’t going her way in exchange for doing Mr. Yellow’s bidding. But did Corrie Wright intend to have more women fall victim to her father? From her choosing her own fate and fortune to the point she is burned alive, I don’t think so.

For a 350-page book, Trad Wife by Sarah Langan was oddly open-ended.

I, personally, was not a fan of the writing style, short staccato sentences and repetitive actions without much development. The atmosphere did not reach its potential for eerie. It blamed women, Corrie for cursing the town (they kept saying Corrie’s Fire and I thought Corrie caused the fire), Mia Wright for making a deal with the devil and for being a neglectful mother, Jenny for being naive, Victoria for being selfish. In that it decenters men, which, I think, is kind of missing the point.

Trad Wife is still a page-turner. You might want to check it out to understand the publishing discourse around trad wife influencer horror books. It is a 3-star read for me, just average.

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