Book Review – Slewfoot By Brom

What if The VVitch was written very straightforwardly with no surprises? It’d still be better than this turned out to be.

By very straightforward, I mean that the story holds very little tension and after the meeting of the main character with the other main character you know how the story is going to play out. Setting the story in 17th century New England with the Puritans is easy fodder. It’s no surprise the stereotypical Puritan would be used (ahistorically) when it came to ideas of personal relationships, public decorum, and sex. There’s a scene where a married couple engages in sex and the man apologizes because it’s not appropriate. The Puritans had a lot of great things to say about sex in the confines of marriage and this wouldn’t be the case. The story also treads on the very publicized but in actuality low number of witch trials that occurred in Salem. This shows the storywriting cannot build drama at all because the witch trials grew out of drama and hysteria and frenzied stories. Here, you just have to say, “Those crazy Christians be burnin’ dah witched all dah time” and you’ve got your realism”. But historical realism is not where I’m going to hang my hat for my review.

I’ll hang my hat on the fact that the story doesn’t even believe in its own worldview. Without getting too much into spoilers, this is a story of revenge, and yet the first human killed is brushed off by the main character because “he just didn’t know” yet revenge is taken on everyone else who “deserved it”. In a world where the characters are alleged to attribute all bad and shortcuts to the devil, all the events in the story match exactly what the devil would do and believe. The story could have taken a great turn if this realization turned out to be the real case, but this is so straightforward storytelling that it could never be that cool. The enactment of revenge is one done to the extreme and overtakes the main character to physical changes occurring. Again, without spoilers, the realization the main character comes through about the reasons for Slewfoot and others is some pantheistic revelation even though the exclusivity of many of the “others gods” are a primary concept. Here, again, we see the desire of belief in the “noble savage” to be the thing to set on the pedestal. The revelation of Slewfoot just happens even though there seems to be other bad gods that speak against to the pantheon message. All these plot elements point to the Puritans being correct – a demon is killing innocent people and witchcraft is making it stronger and is corrupting the individual and the society

With all these things and the unimaginative storytelling, there is no need to compare this to The VVitch or read something you’ve seen in Carrie.