Of all the elements of narrative, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens lays special emphasis on setting. Every page seethes, oozes, and drips with the atmosphere of the fertile, foggy wetlands of Eastern Canada. The heroine, herself named Orchid, feels fully part of this land as she narrates an early paean to its humid joys: “O the fragrance. O the orchid fen. Knee deep in water and muck, slogging through the marshes and wet fields, the shores of the lake, everything humming, chirping, blurred with mosquito clouds and blackflies. This is why I take the long way to work.” The “slogging” and “mosquito clouds” that most people wouldn’t stand are sources of vitality for Orchid, who loves the fen so much that she treks out a “long way” just to spend more time in the “muck.” Soon enough, though, intrigue, exploitation, and betrayal threaten this place when local miners strike gold, putting the entire town around the fen under threat of the various degradations of strip-mining.

The setting’s haziness lends itself to a pervasive sense that reality itself is fuzzy, hard to get a handle on. Orchid’s main first-person narration has a symbiotic relationship with the novel’s varied fragments in other formats, including dream sequences, text messages, letters, and even botanical citations (more on that later). These sundry parts are often destabilizing or mind-bending but always coherent, enacting through form the novel’s themes of ambiguity. This uncertainty also saturates Orchid’s own perceptions. She describes a crucial encounter early in the book like this: “An islet tilted itself in an unusual way, revealing a body. A man, or maybe not a man. […] I see you, I said from somewhere inside myself.” This meeting, described in a way that grants agency to the land “itself,” is ambiguous, even creepy. But this mysterious other isn’t a ghost or a swamp monster. It’s just Jack Bachinski, a fellow townsperson who only seems unreal at first, and whose sensual reality leads him to soon become Orchid’s main love interest.

In this world, real people can seem unreal, and vice versa. We see this in the story’s main speculative element, the panni raklies, vengeful ghosts of wronged women. Aggrieved phantoms dwelling in the mists of soggy fens may sound like a recipe for horror. But unlike author Justine Norton-Kertson in her review of this book, I don’t think that it comes across as horror. While certainly paranormal and eerie, the story doesn’t go for horror’s more typical feelings of shock, dread, or revulsion. Instead, it’s more poignant, intimate, contemplative. Not to get too hung up on labels, but slipstream may be a better lens than horror through which to frame readers’ expectations for this book.

Orchid’s familiarity with the unfamiliar, her normalization of the paranormal, means that the ghosts are not a grotesque and alien other intruding on an otherwise stable natural order. Instead, they are a supportive presence that illuminates the unreality in which she is already living. In a time of crisis, Orchid reflects, “[t]he panni raklies are in the river and I silently beg them for reassurance. For help. Anything. They float against the shore, rise in the shallows, bones shining through the remnants of their skin.” This sight, described in a seemingly ghastly way, does not faze Orchid at all; the panni raklies are simply another part of the soupy environment she loves and in which she takes refuge. The panni raklies become wells of friendship and solidarity, of resistance to the machinations of the unscrupulous miners. Ghosts aren’t so scary when they’re on your side.

While this book is all about setting, so far I’ve talked about place and not the other main aspect, time. Significantly, it isn’t immediately clear when the story is set. While the book eventually shows us contemporary markers like cellphones, text messaging, and modern hospitals, its opening features of fens, flowers, and houses could exist at any number of times over the last few centuries. Before knowing when the story takes place, the reader knows that Orchid’s family has a “secret that has its hands around [her] neck.” If you read the back cover, you already know, even before it’s made explicit in the narrative, that the “secret” is her family’s Romani identity, which Orchid’s family tries strenuously to hide, often moving to a new town every couple of years, if and when their identity comes out. (The author, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, has British Romani ancestry.) This kind of delayed exposition plays a trick on the reader, who might think, “Wow, this discrimination is so bad, the story must take place a long time ago. Surely things are a lot better now.”

But no: This takes place now. While the Roma are, and continue to be, according to cultural anthropologist Andria Timmer, “the most marginalized and ostracized group in Europe,” Roma also experience severe discrimination in Canada, as chronicled in a recent report focusing on the greater Toronto-Hamilton Area where Lee’s book is set. This discrimination is a defining and pervasive feature of Orchid’s life, from an early memory of a schoolteacher, whose doting turns to shunning when Orchid naively reveals her Romani heritage in a school assignment, to a current pressure to put up with an acquaintance’s bigoted comments about Roma, just so she can keep her cover.

The book’s markers of the present, while delayed, are also richly intertwined with its ghostly ambassadors of the past. In a particularly intriguing move, the book also melds its panni raklies with technology on an aesthetic level. When Orchid sees one of the panni raklies using a cellphone, she wonders, “Can dead girls even use cellphones? The other panni raklies crowd around, the phone screen shining greenish into their faces. Or it’s the green of the wreaths braided from river grass and woven into their hair, the girls and grasses decomposing slowly, softening into each other.” Orchid’s fascinating inability to tell if the eerie light comes from the ghosts or the screens was a major “wow” moment for me. The many resonances of the “green” color here prompt us to think about the ever-multiplying unrealities of our own ubiquitous screens.

While Orchid Fens deeply incorporates mobile devices into its textual world, it also gives an especially crafty homage to textual and even scholarly print media. In particular, the text includes, among its many multimedia vignettes, quotes and bibliographic citations of scholarly sources on the botany of orchids. Blending science and poetry, many of these references have more eloquent writing than one would find in a typical botanical journal, with lines like, “The orchid welcomes the fungus into its heart.” After reading several of these curiously lyrical passages, I looked most closely at the bibliographical entries, and I noticed that many of the names were fanciful, with publishers including “Fenn and Greenside” and authors such as “Trace Field.” Were these apparent citations actually a series of Tom Swifties? Sure enough, as I tried to verify these references, it quickly became clear that the vast majority of them don’t exist. And then I came to understand these fictional citations as yet another intriguing dimension of the book’s blending of real and unreal.

This feature has interesting precedents in traditions of speculative fiction. Many speculative books with citational conceits incorporate their tongue-in-cheek references in ways that make the texts’ fictionality self-evident, like the citations of far-future reference works in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books (1951-1953) or Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (2016-2021). But here, some of the citations, if you’re not reading them closely, may seem superficially plausible, just as I thought they were at first, a bit more like George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). They keep you on your toes, make you think twice, and make you question everything.

Nevertheless, for all the novella’s emphasis on unreality, the reader doesn’t care any less about what happens. Its plot is gripping, its stakes urgent. The intra-town conflict over the planned mine, and the personal and political drama this conflict foments, is well paced, builds steadily, and meaningfully develops the story’s themes and motifs. Through it all, Orchid explains to us, “The panni raklies and their vengeance against the unseen things that have happened here […] make us see the deep hidden truths of our lives.” As the word “vengeance” implies, while the panni raklies are friendly to environmentally conscious locals like Orchid, they are, shall we say, somewhat less hospitable toward the developers who want to raze the town and ruin its ecology. Without revealing exactly what forms their vengeance takes, it is worth reflecting that it can be viscerally gratifying to witness the aggrieved ghosts of the past unleashing various doses of righteous retribution on greedy villains, especially when ordinary people at a power disadvantage can’t get justice on their own. Reading about paranormal sources of aid is a sobering reminder that, while we in the mundane world might draw inspiration from our ancestors, those ancestors can’t directly humble the proud, punish the wicked, or stop the bulldozers.

That very knowledge of this gap, the aching chasm between knowing what’s right and having the power to bring it about, is integral to the poignant longing that permeates this book. Its dense ecosystem of desire, romance, friendship, estrangement, and injury will satisfy fans of dark speculative fiction, slipstream, and environmental justice. Just like the damp smells of the fen, this is a read that gets under your skin and stays with you.