The Changeling

The Changeling is a horror novel by the American writer Victor LaValle, published in 2017. It joins a contemporary New York story to fairy-tale and folkloric material, and it was adapted for television in 2023.

The book opens with the meeting of Lillian Kagwa and Brian West in 1968 and follows their son Apollo, born in 1977. Brian disappears when Apollo is small, and Apollo grows up without him, eventually becoming a dealer in rare books and mementos in the city.

As an adult, Apollo marries Emma, an archivist from a very different background, and they have a son, Brian. Emma's behaviour after the birth grows strange and withdrawn, and the novel turns on a night when she does something Apollo cannot explain and then vanishes.

Finding her takes Apollo out of the apartment and into an older world of witches, bargains and borrowed children, where the stories he grew up with turn out to be literal rather than figurative. The search forces him to reckon with what he inherited from his own absent father as much as with what has been taken from him. LaValle writes that other world as an extension of the city, not an escape from it.