I Read Brom’s ‘Slewfoot’.

What attracted me to this book was the alternative sense of witchcraft and what felt like a foul sense of demonic presence. The cover gave a sense of that elder puritanical castaway, and the format of the book gave a very distinct and deliberate odd dimension. For fiction, it was a bit too tall, a bit too long. Even the feel of the cover was strange, with its waxy sheen and watercolor art style. Something about this book drew me in and to further judge the book before its words even began to filter through my eyes, the paintings of the characters shown in the middle of the book gave me an impression of a tome which would be laced with rustic darkness and a folkish inhospitality that would lend itself to a raw and organic evil.

I didn’t really get that.

I think there are a few different books kind of shuffling into each other like so many hands melding together to make a steeple. One is a book of the early American foundations of patriarchal bullshit which casts out a woman, strangling any opportunity to fundamental blackout. Another is a book of the crossroads between witchcraft and christianity as the wilds marry with civilization in the eastern frontier of early colonialism. A third book is a book of the mythology of the indigenous people of colonial new england near Hartford, Connecticut and the ways that their rituals conjured a natural magic from their infinitely old faith in the power of the earth and its spirits. The fourth is a book about how each of those deserve a form of vengeance.

None of these books are particularly any good. The men in positions of power in this book unjustly wield the letter of the law to belittle women, to punish those in circumstances of labor, and to abuse one another by use of doctrine. Most of it seems unfair and impotent. As the reader, a lot of it feels archaic and thinly constructed. Historically, I feel like a lot of this content may have been accurate, but to a microscopic degree that lent itself to form a play with the foundation and backbone of a high school play. A lot of it felt thematically propped up, though I think a lot of the notions were in the right place.

A great majority of this book deals in the bewitching, the summoning and the empowering of a demon with a long legacy in the region. With a sense of resurrected amnesia, so much of the core of this book is an eternal force of Evil, of Life of Power meandering about the countryside asking the middle-aged-male question: “Who am I???” “What am I supposed to be doing???” And that was such a point of weakness for me, a massive portion of the book dedicated to ennui and misdirection. We watch the protagonist toiling and getting her fingers bloody and her body weary to win back her piece of land from a Gaston-esque antagonist, and all the while she is putting in this back breaking work, we get the idea that a demon (or at the very least, an ancient earthen spirit) could help her if only he could sort his midlife crisis. Their relationship begins to take on a little bit of heat, a little bit of spice (despite him being a bipedal goat-breed type… thing?) which feels like it’s only there to propel interest. And that feels like a major issue of the book. Considering it feels like a mish mash of stories trying to come together, the actual driving point of the book feels like it could have been reached in far less time than it actually took.

The entire time I was reading this book, I was simply waiting for the shoe to fall. I knew that with all of the obnoxious and hostile characters that were spiraling around the main characters, I could sense that at some point, one or more of them would be dealt with. It’s got a very Carrie-esque vibe, where our main character is the target of endless barbs and at some point, it was all going to come together where those adversaries would meet their end. And I think the final “scene” of the book was incredibly satisfying because of that. It even felt like it may have been written first, considering how much passion seemed to rise up through the writer’s words and descriptions. It did feel a little bit of a drag trying to find our way there, though.

Nothing really felt archaically evil. Nothing ever ended up truly feeling witchy and pulled from an ancient spiritual part of the earth. Things in this book all felt a little bit forced and manipulated to meet a very YA story structure which, in my experience, feels a little bit too “rah rah”, a little too PG-13 thriller. I don’t recommend this book, as a lot of the themes that I wanted to see come together ultimately were better served in the imagination I had of the book moreso than the execution of the fiction that I actually received.

Edit: I did forget one important thing about this story that I wanted to be sure to mention that took a bit out of the efficacy of the book as well. I had imagined a lot of the strength of Abitha to come from her feminine realization, to erupt from here as she realized that the system she was in was so constricting that she would rise out of her shackles and have a powerful revelation of her potential stature. Insead, a lot of the way the woman (the main character) was written felt dependent upon male characters unnecessarily. She depended upon her deceased husband initially because he was the one who provided her any sort of status within the community, but once she was no longer tied to him, her regular yearning for his advice and assistance was noticeable and seemed to be something of a handicap to her. And then when it came to a point where her power needed to rise up and she needed to overcome obstacles, she depended on another [male] figure to prosper financially and then required magic and supernatural means to overthrow those who kept her down. That felt like a very big misstep in the book and acted as a big distraction throughout. At no point did I feel that she was able to accomplish or thrive due to her own means.