SLEWFOOT, Brom's latest tale of unease and injustice

SLEWFOOT: A Tale of Bewitchery
BROM
Nightfire Books
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A spirited young Englishwoman, Abitha, arrives at a Puritan colony betrothed to a stranger – only to become quickly widowed when her husband dies under mysterious circumstances. All alone in this pious and patriarchal society, Abitha fights for what little freedom she can grasp onto, while trying to stay true to herself and her past.

Enter Slewfoot, a powerful spirit of antiquity newly woken… and trying to find his own role in the world. Healer or destroyer? Protector or predator? But as the shadows walk and villagers start dying, a new rumor is whispered: Witch.

Both Abitha and Slewfoot must swiftly decide who they are, and what they must do to survive in a world intent on hanging any who meddle in the dark arts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Maybe it was the teen angst. Maybe it was my allergy to Villains Without Nuance. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I don't like this book much. I should...spooky dos in Puritan times? folk horror? Revenge?! yes please...and I think I might have if I hadn't taken against Abitha so very strongly. Adolescents whose sense of themselves as Right and Hard Done By aren't enjoyable companions for an entire book. I felt Abitha's difficulties with Authority were period appropriate...totally bought that she was justifiably angry with the entire male world...but she comes across as a modern woman. Then when Slewfoot-the-character wins her over with no effort? He's an innocent, albeit one with tremendous Powers, and with...um...horns? Literal goatly horns. But Abitha just...accepts. It strained me to buy into that.

I'm not insensitive to the appeal of the Other to those trapped in rigid, conformity-enforcing social milieus. But Abitha's ready acceptance of this, um, extremely Other that resembles the goat we meet her losing...and she even calls him "Samson" after the goat...it didn't scan for me with a seventeenth-century woman. Not even one whose upbringing was as peculiar, her mother a root woman and her father a drunken sot, as hers was.

My most favoritest thing is the animate Forest that Slewfoot (he has other names throughout the story, all of which carry their own shades of meaning and of humor) cohabits with, that has re-summoned Slewfoot from a liminal state to deal with Forest's concerns about its future. (I loved Jesus Thunderbird's name for Slewfoot...Hobomok...as it carried so many levels, from a beautiful butterfly to a scary demon via an early American novel about the Noble Savage slur. A quick trip to the internet will give you literal *hours* of perusing pleasure.) Perhaps the most unsettling of Brom's illustrations is the one he made for Creek:

It's perfect, it's unsettlingly Other, and completely relatably familiar all at the same time. What's missing here is the essence of Creek's Wrongness, Otherness...scale...Creek is tiny and looks like that. Sweet dreams!

These being hallmarks of Brom's works, and the source of my relatively high rating for a book I wasn't all the way in sympathy with, so I was rolling along fine until...the torture porn began. Abitha and her mother, women accused of witchcraft, were in for a bad time. I accepted that. But I was revolted by the deeply prurient recounting of the torments meted out to the women, guilty as charged by the lights of the community they lived in though ambiguously so in modern eyes. They transgressed...they paid dearly for it...

"I want to burn them to the ground, All of them. All of it. Their church, their commandments, their covenants, their riles, edicts, and laws, their fields, their homes, and most of all their fucking bonnets and aprons. I want to hollow them out, make them know what it is to lose everything, everything, to lose their very soul!"

Nothing in this life comes for free...the bigger the ask, the bigger the price. There is more truth than you can fully know in the ancient adage, "Be careful what you wish for lest the answer be Yes."