Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by Brom

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

Bravo to Brom. This is the second of his novels that I’ve read, and once again I’m super impressed. There is just something about his writing style — clean, clear, confident — that puts me completely at ease and lets me know I am in capable hands.

Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery is immediately absorbing and unrushed to get into outright horror territory, perhaps because its setup is horrific enough.

Abitha was cast off by her father and essentially sold off into a marriage with an as-yet-unnamed pioneering settler of America. Now thousands of miles away from her native home in England, Abitha lives with her halfwit husband Edward on their homestead on the outskirts of a Puritan New England village.

Expect, it’s not exactly their property. Not yet at least. The parcel of land still technically belongs to Edward’s bullying brother, Wallace. The young couple have very nearly paid off their debt, but they’re about to have the ground literally ripped out from beneath them with the revelation that Wallace used their almost-land as collateral for a business deal that flopped.

Determined not to allow Wallace to destroy the fragile life they’ve built together just as they were about to finally be free of him, Abitha oversteps what is permitted of a woman in this primitive society in standing up to Wallace’s cruel ways. Fortunately, Edward is there to protect her. Until he’s not.

Something wicked this way comes. Or, rather, it was there all along. An ancient evil in the forest that borders Abitha’s farmstead awakens. Sprites with the bodies of animals and the faces of young children call the figure Samson. He’s a goatlike humanoid that is exactly what a puerile Puritan would imagine the devil be.

Edward falls into a cave. Samson arises. Wallace uses Edward’s death as leverage to try and take control of the disputed estate, but Abitha is having none of it. All alone in the world, the girl clearly sees the two possible futures ahead: either she fulfills the agreement between Edward and Wallace and subsequently takes ownership of the farmstead herself, otherwise she falls into servitude to Wallace and probably winds up getting sold off again into another unwanted marriage.

Abitha is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fortunately, she’s intelligent enough to find a slither of opportunity given that even the uber conservative Puritan laws of the land grant a widow the right to act in her deceased husband’s stead.

And so, Abitha is granted the opportunity to produce one last bountiful harvest on the hardscrabble land she and Edward have already poured so much sweat equity into. But she’s just a small thing, there’s no way she can manage it. Is there?

Wallace certainly doesn’t think so, and so he begrudgingly allows her the time to fail, confident that he will be able to claim ownership eventually. What he doesn’t anticipate is that Abitha will strike up a friendship with the creature that calls himself Samson.

At the beginning of Slewfoot, Samson isn’t sure who he is. He thinks of himself as both a shepherd and a slayer, as a conduit for Mother Earth, and in learning about Jesus Christ from Abitha, he notes similarities between himself and the Christian God.

Samson is Abitha’s benefactor. He helps her farm succeed. But a reckoning is coming. Horror will ultimately occur.

For much of the story, it is not clear exactly who or what Samson is. He clearly has great power, but he just as obviously sits outside of the conventional God-Devil dynamic. Surely he’s a sort of old god, a pagan throwback to when the world was young. He himself doesn’t know. Slewfoot is as much about his journey of self-discovery as it is about Abitha’s last-gasp fight for independence.

While not really a scary book, Slewfoot certainly occupies the horror sandbox both in subject matter and occasional bloodiness. Who or whatever Sampson is, he is never positioned as the villain; that’d be the Puritan townsfolk who see the devil in every wild creature’s footprint, and whose own insecurities result in them lashing out at anyone slightly other — and it’s the threat of their ability to control Abitha’s destiny which is most terrifying.

Slewfoot surely owes a debt to the movie The Witch, and also more longstanding examples of pilgrims-versus-witches fiction such as The Crucible. Indeed, the plot points of what happens to Abitha serve to make Slewfoot a definitive archetypal example of this genre.

Slewfoot is historically inspired, but ingeniously modern. This isn’t a simply another retread of an old-fashioned story you’ve heard versions of before; there is a lot more complexity and nuance at work here. It’s an engrossing, bewitching, and spirited horror novel.

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