slewfoot: a tale of bewitchery by brom
here we go. my review of slewfoot: a tale of bewitchery by gerald brom. I have written an honest-to-goodness manuscript of my thoughts, and I still haven't even captured them all. but it's getting late and this is already way too long so we'll just have to make do.
slewfoot is a tale of vengeance and horror and love (I said what I said), wrapped up in folklore and set in a society where one's value is based on what one professes to believe, followed by their gender.
this book is creepy and graphic and sickening, made more so by the feeling that you could stack up every historical era from this country, one on top of the other – stolen land and witch trials, industry and exploitation, jim crow laws and reconstruction into a modern day racialized america where rights continue to be given and taken away – and you'd just see culture and history echoing each other forever and ever, like a double exposed photo capturing all of our crimes.
devils at home, devil in the woods, devils at church, devils everywhere, is there no escape?
it's sickening, I really have no other word for it, and I think the horror of seeing so much human-inflicted violence on the page was multiplied by the fact that it felt foreign and distant, yet disconcertingly familiar. the story takes place in 1666, but it doesn't always feel like it.
there's a lot of depth that you can read into this book. it's a portrait of humans (puritanical humans, at that), and the ways we can be both kind and despicable to one another, ever changeful in where we land on the spectrum. brom seems to suggest that we are flighty creatures underneath our many masks. as forest acknowledges: sometimes there are many truths.
even though the crowd didn’t jeer and taunt, it was on their faces, in their eyes, an almost gleeful bloodlust. she was no longer one of them, no longer a person at all.
this book also reckons with the idea of "good" and "bad" – who gets to be saint, who's designated devil – and it makes us question whether there's validity to the moral judgments that other people bestow upon us. do they have the right of it? surely we're better at knowing and discerning our true selves? or maybe the truth lies somewhere in between, and perhaps we do in fact conform to their views of us in the end...? so many questions, about the nature of who we really are.
abitha laughed. "you think me worried about my soul?" she laughed again, loud and fierce, locking blazing eyes on samson. "I've no soul left," she growled. "they’ve crucified my fucking soul!"
there really was a lot of soul in slewfoot... and also it was TOTALLY CAMPY! as I mentioned before, it could have easily lived on AO3, both in the sense that it needed more editing and I couldn't stop reading. I consumed it the way I consumed twilight, which is to say I’d totally read the fanfic.
one of the most charming (and fanfic-worthy) things about this book was the relationship between abitha and samson – two beings who don't quite fit into the roles they've been assigned. I particularly liked abitha's part in opening samson's eyes to his own duality as not just "slayer" but "guardian" too.
buzzing filled his ears, and he watched several bumblebees bounce from flower to flower. he found their hum soothing, and there, at the moment, felt he could watch them forever. he drank in the scent of flowers, the sweet warm air, the sunlight flittering through the dense leaves. he plucked a flower, studied it, then crushed it in his fist. I will know who I am.
there was a tenderness and a sincerity to their relationship that was conspicuously missing in any other relationship in this book – a great irony, that the devil could be more human than humanity itself. but I guess that's kind of the point.
I read slewfoot as part of my romancelandia university fall curriculum (objective: "romance but burn them at the stake"), and frankly I'm not sure how it made it onto my syllabus in the first place.
was this book a romance? no!
was it meant to be one? probably not!
did I read it as one anyway? yes!
and did it make my reading experience better? a thousand times yes!
he leaned forward, his chin on her shoulder. she glanced at his face, so wild, strange, and savage, yet somehow beautiful. she felt the thrum of his heart join that of hers and the broom, all pulsing together as one.
haters will say the above passage is meant to be a metaphor for our capacity to be "human" and "monster," one and the same. but where's the fun in that?!
and so I say: abitha and samson's relationship was absolutely plausibly romantic. faced with the playing field in sutton village, connecticut, you'd be delusional to choose any human person over samson in all his goat-man devil-monster glory. I'll even take it one step further: everything about this book was monsterfucker coded.
for starters, samson is first introduced to us as "father," which means he is canonically daddy.
second of all, there is admittedly no overt romance in the book, but there are passages like:
and she did, a pulse coming up from the ground, flowing into her hand, their hands, up her arm, into her chest. she felt his heartbeat – it fell in rhythm with hers, then with the pulse, all joined together, all beating as one. "oh, god," she cried as the sweet sensation filled her up.
he began to hum, then chant, talking to the earth, to the corn, more sounds than words. the chant found a rhythm, matching their heartbeat, turning into a song. the ghosts began circling them, chanting and dancing to the rhythm.
he released her and she moaned as the pulse slipped away. more, she thought. give me more!
she fell over, clutching her breast, trying to make herself breathe. he collapsed next to her, his chest heaving.
like, be so for real with me right now.
slewfoot was a striking book on many accounts, never mind the corny dialogue, or the language that most definitely did not exist in 1666. was it a five star read? no. was it a four star read? still no. but the vibes were strong – perfect for the fall season, the weather getting cooler, nights getting longer, especially now, with the moon big and full in the sky. I had all my spooky slewfoot-inspired playlists1 playing in the background, adding to the ambience. scared in my heart but cozy in my bed, making for a memorable and most delightful read.
to conclude, this book left me disgusted by humanity and disappointed for the main characters – and yet I do think it ended on a reasonably uplifting (or at least thought-provoking) note: it forced me to embrace abitha's own duality. the story became not one of good overcoming evil, but rather making space for beauty to exist within a fundamentally ugly premise...?
it's almost better than an ending where everything is sunshine and daisies. there's something very empowering about allowing people to be their entire selves, freeing them from the ill-conceived notion that they are wholly good, admitting the ugliness in the world and in people, and from there finding places for the light to come in.
and for a moment, she forgot about her anger, her venom, of her need to claw wallace’s eyes out, and just enjoyed the simple pleasure of the warm wind in her hair, the song of the night, and the beauty of the moonlight bathing all in its warm autumn glow.