I've been fascinated by witchcraft and the occult for as long as I can remember. When I was about 10, all the kids in all the schools in the county had to write a poem, and the best ones would be put in a book and published. Everyone else wrote poems about friends and football and family. I wrote one about a witch being burned at the stake, which I think tells you everything you need to know about what kind of kid I was, and also what kind of adult I turned into. My mum still has a copy of that book lurking around somewhere, and if you ask nicely she might just dig it out and show you what a twisted little creep I have always been. I knew the second I saw Slewfoot that I had to read it.
Sold by her drunken father to be a bride to a stranger in the New World, spirited and independent Abitha is not the ideal Puritan bride. When her husband Edward dies in mysterious circumstances, Abitha is left alone, fighting to keep her freedom and her rights in the pious and patriarchal community. Struggling to maintain her farm at the edge of the wild woods, she turns to the spirits of the forest for help, and it isn't long before the rumourmill in the village is rife with the most dangerous word for a woman in Abitha's position: Witch.
I'll get straight to the point. This is my favourite book of the year. I know, I know we're only in August, there's a whole four and a half months left of 2022 but I'm calling it now. I loved this so much and the sheer lengths that anything else would have to go to to knock Slewfoot off my top spot makes it pretty unlikely. I went away for the weekend, half way through reading this and it is a nice hardback and I was staying in a tent, I didn't take it with me. Believe me when I tell you I didn't stop thinking about it all weekend (except for the 40 minutes or so I was crammed inside a very narrow rock chimney but that's a different story). A lot of the time I will gush about a book on here, wax lyrical about how much I loved it, but then caveat my enthusiasm with a "however, I do wish that X or Y had been done differently. There are no caveats here. There is nothing I would change about this book, nothing more I wanted from it. I was completely and utterly satisfied.
So, let's talk about it. Slewfoot mixes elements of a lot of things, but first and foremost, this is a fairytale. A dark fairytale, more in the wheelhouse of Pan's Labyrinth than Cinderella, but a fairytale none the less. Secondly, it's a folk horror. A "good-for-her" horror - think Midsommer or The VVitch. Finally, in the last third or so, it becomes more like a Quentin Tarantino film, which was a pleasant surprise - I did not see that coming, even if I guessed where the overall plot was heading almost straight away. It's dark, creepy, and it weaves pagan magic and religious fervour into a violent crescendo in a masterful way. The horrors of patriarchal oppression (the real villain, obv), and the dangers of superstition leave us rooting hard for main character Abitha, the strong rebellious young woman we all hope we would have had the courage to be, had we been unfortunate enough to be born into that era. Intertwined with the Salem inspired witch hunt is a tale of the resilience of nature in the face of man, and the dichotomous role of nature in both joyful life and brutal death as horned forest deity Samson tries to find his place in it all. If Abitha inspired respect and support, I just wanted to give Samson a hug for most of the book, and his relationship with the young widow is touching and evolves in a fascinating manner over the course of the book.
One more thing I want to give particular highlight to here are the illustrations. This book is absolutely beautiful. Brom is a painter as well as an author and Slewfoot benefits from this by showcasing about two dozen of his paintings. Most of them are in greyscale at the start of each chapter, but the showstoppers are the eight full colour plates, gorgeously creepy renditions bringing the main characters to life. Why don't more adult novels have pictures? Why is that something that only kids get? Maybe I'll start a petition.
If you like tales of witchery and revenge, if you like folk horror and historical fiction portrayed through the lens of a grim pagan fairytale, then light your candles, make a sacrifice to the Green Man and get ready to marvel at the beautiful artwork - this is definitely for you.
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