Nicola Griffith's Slow River is an acclaimed piece of science fiction, and insofar as it has realistic portrayals of the interactions between chemistry, biology, corporations, and the environment, it's a very successful book. But when it comes to the personal and family intrigue, the book has problems. Too many times, the characters' motivations are in question, so the plausibility of the novel suffers. Katerine, especially, is a character whose actions are never fully explicated, who serves as a major antagonist without a cause.

We first encounter Katerine as the one who resisted her husband's push to have their genes returned to normal. The gray hair is a way of “saying to the world, look, I'm so rich I can afford to have this expensive anticancer treatment” and even though Oster thinks they should turn the gene back on, Katerine “want[s] [Lore] to have all the visible trappings of the rich and powerful” (52). It's not entirely clear why this is the case. In fact, it seems rather narrow-sighted, or selfish, for Katerine to do this, though plausible that she's doing it for the sake of her children.

Then there is the important scene where Lore wakes to “the monster... breathing hot fire on her neck and groaning like a beast” (68). Katerine in this scene makes a small effort at being comforting, but really she just seems to dismiss Lore's bothers, asking “How could it have got in?” and calling it “Just a dream” (68). We later discover that this is because Katerine herself is the “monster” and she must be trying to hide it. But we never find out why she does this. Presumably Katerine has some sort of perverse sexuality, but there's never a scene where she explains how she fought against it, or came to accept it, or how she developed it in the first place. Oster, in the same scene, is comforting and helpful. He “takes her hand” and tries to soothe her, offers to “find a lock” for her door immediately, while Katerine is heading off for some “net conference” the next morning (68-69). It is stated that Oster's actions, throughout the book, are motivated in part by competing with his wife for Lore's affection, but his behavior (unlike Katerine's) tends also to be the nurturing love of a parent, whereas Katerine seems caught up in the corporation all the time, and spurns family matters that don't interact with the company.

It is significant that Oster, not Katerine, is the one who “is fond of saying” that “the company is not the same as the family” (103). This is because, for Katerine, they are the same. When Katerine wants to spend family time with Lore, she “scribbles some catalytic reaction equation on a napkin” and sends “case studies... over the net” while her father “suggests they go look for tree frogs” or “talks... about the new species of carp” (108). Katerine seems focused on training her daughter to be the perfect member of the van der Oest business, not so much on letting her develop as an individual. Katerine's idea of family fun time is the same as school time.

So Katerine is totally consumed by her business, and placed in stark contrast with Oster, who barely involves himself in the family business, instead concentrating on whimsical pet projects; but when Lore has a difficult time, Katerine is the one at fault, and Oster is the one who supports her. This speaks to the problems of being so consumed by work that one loses everything else, and that is the only thing approaching an explanation for what makes Katerine a monster.