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Vile Figs
230 pages, Paperback
Published June 5, 2025
About the author
Tess Kincaid
7 books11 followersTess Kincaid has written three novels; PECHEWA: AN AMERICA ODYSSEY (2024), LIMESTONE: LEGACY OF A CURSE (2024), VILE FIGS (2025), and MANCUNIAN BITTER (2026) all available from Amazon.
Her poetry collections have been published by Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Iodine Poetry Journal, Ohio Poetry Association Anthology, Prole, and numerous online journals. She is a Forward Prize nominee.
Her poetry collections have been published by Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Iodine Poetry Journal, Ohio Poetry Association Anthology, Prole, and numerous online journals. She is a Forward Prize nominee.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 12, 2026
This wonderfully written story of historical fiction could serve as a treatise on character development. Weaving together the characters, both past and present is a gift the author has used in her previous novels with aplomb. I, having trained in a State psychiatric hospital, can attest to the accuracy of the situations described here in. As such, it's a heart wrenching story that will touch even the hardest of hearts. I recommend this book without reservation!
August 28, 2025
If Edna Ferber wrote Vile Figs, it would have been five-hundred pages long and cut nowhere near as close to the bone. Tess Kincaid compresses a sprawling family saga into two-hundred pages of lapidary and often incandescent prose.
“ ‘We’re born, we grow, we decay and die just like animals,’ Mame said. ‘But we have to take charge. Teach life to sit, to stay. Teach it to roll over and play dead.’”
Kincaid has brought the lives of her characters to heel, making them reveal their essence in a heartbreaking and hilarious story of the mad and desperate scramble to love and to survive.
I use the term ‘mad’ advisedly. The first section of Vile Figs takes place in the women’s ward at Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane, where we meet Emma, the narrative center of the story. I use the term ‘desperate’ advisedly because the story reveals the struggles of one family to survive, and not only endure, but prevail. In his 1949 Nobel Prize Address, William Faulkner said “I believe that man … is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”
Kincaid has done this in spades.
For this reader, the saga revealed its heart and soul in “Part Three, Galena 1885.” Here the natural world predominates, taking on a vivid and performative presence, not only surrounding and infusing, but molding the lives of the Rathfon family. “The Galena region’s lesioned back was quickly turned upside down, exposing its secret leaden underbelly like a fearsome kraken sleeping beneath the shallow surface.” Lead, that fundamental and deadly poison, enters the bloodstream of the family saga, its ways mysterious, and never lets go, weaving a dark spell in the genetic substructure of their lives.
In Galena, we enter the magical world of sublime and terrible nature. The paradoxical Nancy, the matriarch of the Rathfon family, nurtures an alien fig tree from California in Kansas summers “hot and so dry the bushes are following the dogs around,” and bone-chilling winters when “the praise and prayers of summer birds had silenced for a season, pulling up stakes and moving somewhere softer. [Nancy] crept downstairs to light the fire and make coffee. Dawn dragged near in a heavy bucket hauled from the other side of the world.”
Juxtaposed to the still and live births of Nancy’s children, her stepson Hick stumbles upon a rattlesnake. “He continued to watch from a few steps back as a small wad of snake encased in a slick transparent bubble bulged from a slit in the rattler’s underbelly…. Then another snake slid out and another, until there were seven perfectly formed baby snakes beside the mother. As Hick slowly backed away, an owl dove from above and glided away with a tiny snake writhing in its beak.”
Nature boiled down to its essence, the alpha and omega of earthly existence.
As events move deeper into the 20th century, the vibrant and essential connection to the natural world is obscured by the realities of modern life, but never lost, and never completely severed. That indissoluble connection to the natural world is both torment and salvation throughout this tale, as birth and death occur and recur across generations, filling life with horror and exaltation.
At her nadir, Emma, Nancy’s daughter and the fulcrum of the story, says “I’m afraid I’ve become my grief. I’m no longer flesh and blood. I’m a closet. A gray dusty closet everyone’s forgotten.”
While the chimerical Mame – anagram of Emma – speaking from the depths of the hospital for the insane, says, “Don’t fret about it, Em. In a short while all this will be a long time ago. Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. We ain’t crazy you know.”
Summer/winter, sanity/madness, birth/death, love/hate, are the nuclei around which the story spins, lives jumping orbit from history to the present. Edna’s Ferber’s head would spin, but to a modern sensibility, Kincaid has spun a truly modern saga, a miraculous web with one end tethered in the natural world and the other in the fantastic inner lives of ordinary and amazing people.
“Well, there’s no such thing as an uninteresting life,” [Henry said]. “Inside the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
“ ‘We’re born, we grow, we decay and die just like animals,’ Mame said. ‘But we have to take charge. Teach life to sit, to stay. Teach it to roll over and play dead.’”
Kincaid has brought the lives of her characters to heel, making them reveal their essence in a heartbreaking and hilarious story of the mad and desperate scramble to love and to survive.
I use the term ‘mad’ advisedly. The first section of Vile Figs takes place in the women’s ward at Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane, where we meet Emma, the narrative center of the story. I use the term ‘desperate’ advisedly because the story reveals the struggles of one family to survive, and not only endure, but prevail. In his 1949 Nobel Prize Address, William Faulkner said “I believe that man … is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”
Kincaid has done this in spades.
For this reader, the saga revealed its heart and soul in “Part Three, Galena 1885.” Here the natural world predominates, taking on a vivid and performative presence, not only surrounding and infusing, but molding the lives of the Rathfon family. “The Galena region’s lesioned back was quickly turned upside down, exposing its secret leaden underbelly like a fearsome kraken sleeping beneath the shallow surface.” Lead, that fundamental and deadly poison, enters the bloodstream of the family saga, its ways mysterious, and never lets go, weaving a dark spell in the genetic substructure of their lives.
In Galena, we enter the magical world of sublime and terrible nature. The paradoxical Nancy, the matriarch of the Rathfon family, nurtures an alien fig tree from California in Kansas summers “hot and so dry the bushes are following the dogs around,” and bone-chilling winters when “the praise and prayers of summer birds had silenced for a season, pulling up stakes and moving somewhere softer. [Nancy] crept downstairs to light the fire and make coffee. Dawn dragged near in a heavy bucket hauled from the other side of the world.”
Juxtaposed to the still and live births of Nancy’s children, her stepson Hick stumbles upon a rattlesnake. “He continued to watch from a few steps back as a small wad of snake encased in a slick transparent bubble bulged from a slit in the rattler’s underbelly…. Then another snake slid out and another, until there were seven perfectly formed baby snakes beside the mother. As Hick slowly backed away, an owl dove from above and glided away with a tiny snake writhing in its beak.”
Nature boiled down to its essence, the alpha and omega of earthly existence.
As events move deeper into the 20th century, the vibrant and essential connection to the natural world is obscured by the realities of modern life, but never lost, and never completely severed. That indissoluble connection to the natural world is both torment and salvation throughout this tale, as birth and death occur and recur across generations, filling life with horror and exaltation.
At her nadir, Emma, Nancy’s daughter and the fulcrum of the story, says “I’m afraid I’ve become my grief. I’m no longer flesh and blood. I’m a closet. A gray dusty closet everyone’s forgotten.”
While the chimerical Mame – anagram of Emma – speaking from the depths of the hospital for the insane, says, “Don’t fret about it, Em. In a short while all this will be a long time ago. Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. We ain’t crazy you know.”
Summer/winter, sanity/madness, birth/death, love/hate, are the nuclei around which the story spins, lives jumping orbit from history to the present. Edna’s Ferber’s head would spin, but to a modern sensibility, Kincaid has spun a truly modern saga, a miraculous web with one end tethered in the natural world and the other in the fantastic inner lives of ordinary and amazing people.
“Well, there’s no such thing as an uninteresting life,” [Henry said]. “Inside the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
September 23, 2025
Review
Vile Figs, Tess Kincaid. 2025 (self published)
Reviewed by: Bill Ursel
September 22, 2025
The novel Vile Figs takes the reader on a journey through mental illness, love, identity, and kinship. Tess Kincaid walks us through the river of time. Characters span a period between the late 1880’s through to 1978.
The relationships created between women are compelling. Through loss of self to loveless marriages to the haze of treatment for mental and physical pain, the voices of Emma (institutionalized in 1916 and labelled insane) and her great great granddaughter Quincy captivated me. The novel shares the relentless role of women in professions becoming objects of play for male colleagues. (See Dr. Stockton and her struggle to stay the course in her work at Seven Steeples, the women’s ward of the Central State Indiana Hospital for the Insane). A family member of Emma appears in another guise, or is that truly the case? That conversation between Emma and kin is revealing.
The title of Kincaid’s work is Vile Figs. It is fitting to share what Emma see’s during a Rorschach test. Dr. Stockton asks Emma “Tell me what you see in it (a single slide).” “A vile fig” answers Emma. “It’s a heavy thing that comers over me sometimes. It makes me afraid. I don’t know if I should shove someone to the ground or run off and cry. It makes me more than just afraid. It’s dark and deep and sticky and sad. When I get like this, I call it the vile figs.” . . .
I highly recommend this novel that carries the weight of loss, love, and discovery.
Vile Figs, Tess Kincaid. 2025 (self published)
Reviewed by: Bill Ursel
September 22, 2025
The novel Vile Figs takes the reader on a journey through mental illness, love, identity, and kinship. Tess Kincaid walks us through the river of time. Characters span a period between the late 1880’s through to 1978.
The relationships created between women are compelling. Through loss of self to loveless marriages to the haze of treatment for mental and physical pain, the voices of Emma (institutionalized in 1916 and labelled insane) and her great great granddaughter Quincy captivated me. The novel shares the relentless role of women in professions becoming objects of play for male colleagues. (See Dr. Stockton and her struggle to stay the course in her work at Seven Steeples, the women’s ward of the Central State Indiana Hospital for the Insane). A family member of Emma appears in another guise, or is that truly the case? That conversation between Emma and kin is revealing.
The title of Kincaid’s work is Vile Figs. It is fitting to share what Emma see’s during a Rorschach test. Dr. Stockton asks Emma “Tell me what you see in it (a single slide).” “A vile fig” answers Emma. “It’s a heavy thing that comers over me sometimes. It makes me afraid. I don’t know if I should shove someone to the ground or run off and cry. It makes me more than just afraid. It’s dark and deep and sticky and sad. When I get like this, I call it the vile figs.” . . .
I highly recommend this novel that carries the weight of loss, love, and discovery.
September 23, 2025
There is so much to enjoy and take away from Tess Kincaid's third novel. Fine poetic writing, simple apparently, yet powerful, I have come to expect from her. I must say I have not had this much regard for a contemporary writer since Iain Banks. What I found most memorable were the flashes of dark humour lighting up the grimness of the asylum Seven Steeples and the hardships of life in a small Kansas town. The echoes from that part of the story resound in the more recent past as Emma Pullen's descendant Quincy comes to terms with her own life's challenges, the timelines handled brilliantly as in Kincaid's previous novels. A great read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews