TL;DR: Trad Wife is a demonic-pregnancy, influencer-satire pressure cooker where a woman tries to monetize domestic bliss until motherhood starts charging interest in blood. It’s got some fucked up, memorable set pieces and a wicked thesis, but it also spins its wheels in the middle and arrives at its big swing with a bit too much “yep, we get it” throat-clearing.

Camille is the POV, a “Hi friends!” tradwife content machine filming her own pregnancy-test reveal like it’s the Oscars. She’s married to Graham Deming, a churchy control-freak who loves the aesthetic of a wife more than the person inside the apron, and they’ve moved to an isolated homestead where the vibes are “golden hour and sour rot.” Camille wants the missing accessory that completes the brand, a baby, and when reality does not deliver on schedule, she goes full influencer-brain and tries to hack the universe for engagement. In the woods behind the house sits a well that eats light, and Camille, penny in hand, whispers the wish out loud. What she gets is not a miracle, it’s a contract.

Saratoga Schaefer’s background makes the pivot into this kind of social horror feel intentional: they are a horror and thriller author (they/them) with a debut in the crime/thriller lane (Serial Killer Support Group) and a public-facing interest in online culture and “content creation” as a milieu. Trad Wife is also explicitly positioned as demonic pregnancy horror for fans of Nightbitch and Mary, which tells you exactly what sandbox we’re playing in.

What’s special here is the way the book weaponizes the tradwife gaze. Camille doesn’t just want a child, she wants the image of one: tiny feet in frame, a curated caption, the algorithm’s warm little hand on her back. The satire lands best when it’s fused to the horror mechanics: “we’ll have to edit it” tenderness becomes the runway for a newborn doing something no newborn should ever do, namely chomping on mom like she’s a Capri Sun. The infamous toe scene is spectacularly disgusting, and it’s gross in a way that feels thematically earned rather than shock-for-shock’s-sake. Camille’s body becomes a content farm, literally, with feeding “spots” and constant concealment, bronzer and layers covering the rot underneath the brand. That’s the book at its best: the domestic tableau still staged for an audience while the floorboards are getting wet.

Schaefer writes in a propulsive first-person that’s easy to inhale, and the trimester structure keeps the momentum psychologically tight even when the plot meanders. The prose has a glossy, Instagram-ready surface that curdles nicely when the horror hits. But the middle stretch leans hard on repetition: Camille spirals, posts, lies, hides, spirals again. The Graham stuff also gets a bit one-note (he’s a coward, a hypocrite, a walking linty beard of patriarchy), and while that’s kind of the point, it makes the relationship drama feel thinner than the body horror deserves. The most effective human tension comes from the Renee Colt thread: divorce, custody, and how society treats women with no money and no “respectable” scaffolding. When Camille starts seeing her own future in that cautionary tale, the book stops being a satire and becomes a threat assessment.

This is about performative womanhood under capitalism and patriarchy, and the way “trad” aesthetics can be a trap door disguised as a doily. The horror machinery expresses that by turning motherhood into literal extraction: Camille feeds the baby “not from my breasts but from my blood,” which is a thesis sentence wearing a bib. Ultimately, you’re left with the idea that if you build your identity as a brand, something will eventually come to collect on it, and it will not accept store credit. (Also, you will never look at toes the same way again. Sorry.)

Coming off a thriller debut, Trad Wife feels like Schaefer leveling up their social commentary by making the metaphor physical, sticky, and violent, and when it commits to the body-horror punchline, it’s a hell of a bite. It’s not a new subgenre lane, but it’s a mean little entry with a couple scenes that will absolutely haunt group chats.

A sharp premise with some truly fucked highlights, but the mid-book repetition and blunt character beats keep it from being more than a memorable, messy snack.

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer,
published February 10, 2026 by Crooked Lane Books.