Episode #36
Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by Brom
Send us Fan Mail The first page of *Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery* wants you to point at the forest and say, “There’s the evil.” We try that, and the book immediately pulls the rug out. As we talk through Brom’s colonial New England, the real horror starts to look less like witchcraft and more like a community that can use law, scripture, and social custom to strip a widow of safety, property, and choice. We dig into Abitha as a character who doesn’t fit Puritan expectations, why some readers call her “too modern,” and how the story makes her danger feel historically real instead of performative. Then we follow the awakening of Slewfoot himself, a being whose identity changes with every name people force onto him: Satan, Samson, spirit, monster, god. That slippery naming becomes the core theme, because once you label something “evil,” you can stop listening, stop empathizing, and start justifying almost anything. From there the conversation gets uncomfortable on purpose: religious hypocrisy and the hijacking of Christianity, patriarchy and female rage, colonialism and cultural erasure, and the thin line between justice and revenge. We even connect the book’s obsession with labeling to modern politics, where a single word can flatten whole lives into something “deserved.” If you like literary horror, folk horror, Salem-adjacent witch trial stories, and moral philosophy that actually bites, you’ll have a lot to argue with us about. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves dark books, and leave a review if our take made you think. When you finish listening, what do you think the novel is really saying about monsters and the people who name them? Support the show
