Wetlands, Witch Girls, and Whispered Revenge: Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens Is a Haunting Folk-Horror Masterpiece

by Justine Norton-Kertson

If you’ve ever walked into a swamp and felt like something was watching you—really watching you—Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens will reach into your chest and squeeze. Published by the reliably radical Stelliform Press, this novella is a gut-punch of atmospheric folk horror, dripping with grief, beauty, and the heavy scent of rot.

Set in the liminal space between a poisoned river and a haunted marsh in Northern Ontario, Orchid Fens follows Orchid Lovell, a young Romany woman trying to live invisibly in a town that sees her as a stain. But the land sees her differently. And it calls her back. Through ghost girls, toxic tailings, and a greenhouse of sexed-up orchids, Lee crafts a story where the horror doesn’t just crawl out of the water—it blooms from it.

Let’s talk about the panni raklies, shall we? These drowned women, these vengeance ghosts, these rot-slicked river spirits are the novella’s dark, beating heart. They haunt the creek where men dumped their secrets, and they’re not just lingering—they’re recruiting. Think La Llorona meets The Virgin Suicides, dipped in a slurry of arsenic and folklore. Their presence is terrifying not because they scream or attack, but because they see. They know. And they’re waiting.

But the human horror here is just as brutal. Misogyny, racism, and inherited trauma hang thick in the air like fog over the fen. Lee doesn’t pull punches. Carminetown is a dying mining town full of secrets, bad water, and worse men. The mine seeps into everything—its tailings, its ghosts, its legacy of broken bodies. Orchid’s mother, her dead-end boyfriends, the town’s women—all scarred by a system that devours and discards.

And yet, amid the rot, there’s a strange tenderness. Orchid’s romance with the soft-spoken, mud-slicked miner Jack Bachinski (yes, you will want to kiss him too) is as wet and weird as it is genuine. Their love feels earned, like something dug out of the muck. It’s horror-romance perfection.

What makes Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens so damn effective is Lee’s prose: lyrical, fragmented, laced with poetry and fury. The structure slips between styles—first-person narration, botanical footnotes, ghost stories, text messages, grocery lists—all woven into a single tapestry of rot and resilience. It’s part eco-horror, part gothic ghost story, part intergenerational curse.

At under 200 pages, this is a book that reads fast but lingers. It crawls under your skin and hums like insects in tall grass. And once you’ve seen the girls in the river, you can’t unsee them.

Final Verdict:
If you’re a horror fan who likes your scares folkloric, your stories queer and feminist, and your setting a little too wet for comfort, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is for you. Read it alone. Read it by a body of water. Just don’t listen too closely when the water starts to sing your name.

Rating: 10/10 haunted river girls
File under: eco-horror, folklore, feminist rage, wet and weird

Available April 2025. Pre-order available now from Stelliform Press.