I picked up Brom’s novel Slewfoot more or less on a whim— I know him from his comic book work, but was unaware that he’d written any books until finding this one on a table at Barnes & Noble. That cover is haunting as hell (an apt description for most of his artwork, to be honest) and the book actually has an insert of several full-color paintings of the main characters, plus smaller pieces of artwork adorning each of the chapter headings, so I figured even if the writing itself wasn’t that good I would be getting some cool artwork out of the deal.
Well, I’ll be picking up more of his books, now that I know they exist. Slewfoot is not the most original book ever written— when I tell you the main character is a woman in Puritan Connecticut during the 1600s, combined with the cover and the subtitle “A tale of bewitchery,” you will no doubt be able to map out a lot of the broader beats of the story all by yourself with little effort, and you’ll mostly be correct. Is religious intolerance a theme? Yep. Is there a group of men whose goal is to fit main character Abitha into a box that she doesn’t want to be in? Yep. Will there eventually be a trial scene where she is accused of witchcraft, and the accompanying scenes of torture and interrogation? Yep.
(She doesn’t have goat legs, by the way. At first.)
Because, of course, the next question is going to be “Did Goody Good see her with the devil,” and the answer’s going to have to be sort of. Abitha’s husband dies early in the book and her shithead of a brother-in-law immediately starts to try to steal her farm out from underneath her so that he can pay off his debts, and, yeah, there’s something in the woods, but is it The Devil with capital letters? It certainly doesn’t seem to be. And Abitha has certain talents and skills learned from her mother, a cunning woman in her own right, and certainly not a Puritan— in fact, Abitha herself wasn’t born a Puritan, and in fact appears to have been more or less sold to her husband as the seventeenth-century version of a mail-order bride.
So she’s an outsider, too, in addition to all the other stuff, and, well, that’s not entirely a new idea either.
This book, in other words, isn’t necessarily good because of what it’s about, because as soon as you say Puritan you’re automatically conditioned in this country to expect a certain kind of story, and you’re going to get more or less what you’re expecting. Right up until the goat-legs thing, at least. And the bloody, bloody revenge. But there’s room for something to be reasonably predictable while still being a really good example of the thing that it is, and that’s what this is. Yeah, this is a book about a sort-of-but-not-really witch who is mostly just a woman with her own mind and her own opinions, in a world where all of those things are strongly frowned upon, and we’ve read that before. But I like genre books for a reason, and originality isn’t everything, and this is a really good seventeenth-century horror story, stuffed full of cool art as a bonus. It’s well worth checking out.
On the plane on the way to Denver it became obvious very quickly that the young woman one row ahead of me and across the aisle was going to the same event I was. She was in her early 20s, blonde, pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way and, as it turned out, really chatty. She spent the entire trip talking with everyone around her, a circle that grew bigger as it became clear just how many of us were on the plane for the same reason. The guy she was seated next to, who was in his late forties or perhaps even his early fifties, wasn’t with us. I overheard her mention her boyfriend at least two or three times during the flight, and it’s not as if I heard their entire conversation. Later on, she told me that he’d spent some time talking about his daughters, one of whom is a recent high school graduate– meaning that she and the eldest daughter were no more than three or four years apart.
If you’ve been paying attention to my posts lately, or to my Twitter feed, you can probably guess why I didn’t post yesterday, and I suspect you’d be right. I’ve been trying to write about it and I’m not quite there yet, for a variety of reasons. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please forgive the vaguebooking; all will be made clear soon enough.