First and of most importance: if you decide to read this book, please take the listed Content and Trigger Warnings seriously, because some were big unhappy surprises to me and to other readers.
MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNINGS HEREIN.
This book includes scenes that feature seizures, domestic violence, death, ED, family conflict, blood, gore, sexual assault recounted on page by a character, abuse, assault, kidnapping, sexual violence, emotional abuse, controlling behavior, pedophilia, suicidal ideation, sexual harassment, murder, and suicide.
This book started out so strong and then collapsed at the end. After about 65%, I was rage reading. And I can’t discuss any of what went wrong for me without spoilers, so be ye warned – spoilers ahoy.
The cover copy does all the work here, so I’m going to let it explain the plot:
Piers Corbin has always had an affinity for poisonous things – plants and men. From the pokeweed berries she consumed at age five that led to the accidental death of a stranger, to the husband whose dark proclivities have become… concerning, poison has been at the heart of her story.
But when she fakes her own death in an attempt to escape her volatile marriage and goes to stay with her estranged great aunt in the mountains, she realizes her predilection is more than a hunger – it’s a birthright. Piers comes from a long line of poison eaters – Bane Witches – women who ingest deadly plants and use their magic to rid the world of evil men.
Piers sets out to earn her place in her family’s gritty but distinguished legacy, all while working at her Aunt Myrtle’s cafe and perpetuating a flirtation with the local, well-meaning sheriff to allay his suspicions on the body count she’s been leaving in her wake. But soon she catches the attention of someone else, a serial killer operating in the area. And that only means one thing – it’s time to feed.
A poison-eating bane witch ready to take out shitty ass men?
A secret network of women with powers to rebalance injustice against vulnerable people?
Well, that sounds like a great time. We’re going to have catharsis! We’re going to have vengeance! I had a book-length dose of “Earl Had to Die” and I was ready.
Then I got to the end.
I reiterate: Spoilers Ahoy because there’s no way to talk about this without talking about the structural and narrative problems in the last quarter of the book.
My main problem with this book is Piers, whose character development is a circle, one made of emotional and motivational wibbling. I got the sense that the moral uncertainty about being a killer of terrible people was supposed to weigh on Piers but mostly she just runs back and forth between accepting her powers to freaking out, yelling, and whining about them to her great aunt Myrtle. The aspects she learns of being a bane witch don’t seem to have much of an impact nor do they influence any of her decisions.
Actually, let’s start with an egregious example of that exact behavior.
Show Spoiler
No one, not even Great Aunt Myrtle, is exempt from Piers’ inability to Learn Things.
After she learns she’s a bane witch, and learns what a bane witch IS, Piers learns from Cop Hero (yes, the hero is a cop – more on that in a moment) that Myrtle might not be trustworthy because she is suspected of killing a 21 year old man. There wasn’t enough evidence to arrest her, but Myrtle was suspected enough that Cop Hero is telling Myrtle’s relative about it.
So Piers immediately goes and challenges Myrtle with this info, not even thinking for a second, based on the MANY OTHER CONVERSATIONS that Myrtle and the other witches have already had with her, that maybe there was a reason this man was marked as prey.
(There was. I knew there would be. Why Piers didn’t think about it for 2 more seconds is beyond me. I grew to be very frustrated with her. An ability to poison terrible people is wasted on someone who is oblivious to the obvious.)
Note: this following paragraph spoils a LOT of the reveals, and I’m hiding it for that reason, but you can highlight to read if you’re interested in my ranting. Highlight to read.
Their magic happens when a terrible man is so terrible that he becomes appropriate bane witch prey (I don’t recall any women being killed by the coven, though certainly there are many predatory women)
Terrible Man is then drawn to the Bane Witch because the witches begin to release a scent that attracts him. The witch in question becomes ravenous for poison, ingesting as much as possible – a signal that their prey is getting closer. When their prey is drawn intimately close to them by magical allure, the now-venomous witch kills them by making sure their prey is exposed to all the toxins they’ve eaten – a scratch, a kiss, spitting on him, whatever. Once the dreadful prey is dead, the witch is no longer poisonous to others.
Piers should KNOW at this point that if any person was marked as prey to one of the coven witches, there was a REASON for that. It’s not indiscriminate. There is always a reason those men are drawn to the bane witches, and there is always a reason for them to be poisoned. The magic happens when there are reasons for it to exist.
So for Piers to go off on Myrtle about maybe having killed someone is incredibly silly. Has she not been listening to Myrtle at all?
Adding to the unlimited Uno reverse card of Piers’ feelings about her new powers are the massive hornypants that Piers has for Cop Hero. I don’t remember his name and it’s not important. He’s the sheriff, it’s a small town, he’s dogged and determined, everybody knows him – you get the picture.
I’m guessing that maybe he’s also meant to cause some plot tension or at least interpersonal tension – can’t tell the cop we’re all out here killing bad folks extrajudicially – but that tension fizzles out, much like every other tension in the story.
Show Spoiler
Piers wants both her powers and her cop hero, so she decides to have both, and he just…stays away from her when she tells him to, after she’s told him about her whole poison business.
No, really: Cop Hero does a long sit/stay like a good boy because Piers tells him to. That’s the resolution to the “I’m killing bad dudes and my boyfriend is a cop” tension. Sit. Stay.
Because he’s supposed to be entirely good? Or something? Or maybe he has the moral fortitude of damp flour.
I have no idea and I don’t care. It’s not explored at all, and the tension of “Oh shit my hot bf is a cop and I’m poisoning people even though I might feel bad about it except I don’t really” ends up as yet another nothingburger with a side of nothingfries. Is the message supposed to be that the men around the bane witches are inept and easily led to safety or their deaths? Couldn’t tell you.
Then the plot made me ripping mad.
Again, whopper of a spoiler here. Highlight to read.
One of the villains kills Myrtle, and I think I was more upset about it than Piers was.
Killing Myrtle was silly and unnecessary to the plot. But more enraging to me was that her death was handled by Piers as if it were an annoyance.
If a major character is harmed or killed, usually the protagonist would feel grief, maybe? Some sadness? I certainly did. I was shocked and very upset, both because it was surprising and because it was unnecessary. Even though Myrtle and the other witches in the coven all had Interpersonal Issues and Questionable Personalities, it was an unbelievable twist that felt insulting to me as the reader. If this had been a paper book, that’s when it would have hit the wall.
But Piers’ reaction read to me more like frustration. What might have decimated another person emotionally was, for her, more of an, “Oh, gosh golly gee willikers, I fucked up. I better get that bad guy next time.” Like it was a lesson more than a loss. If I’m judging by the emotional reaction, the victim wasn’t a person; she was a plot device. Which honestly kind of matches Piers because she’s a character in service to the plot most of the time, too.
I ended up SO MAD at this book.
If an event was supposed to have an impact, show the impact.
If villains are supposed to be scary and difficult, MAKE them scary and difficult, not easy to kill in a paragraph.
If the coven and the other witches are so important, then offing one of the main witches should be a big fucking deal, and not something that shows up a short ways from the end of the book and is treated like receiving a wrong number phone call at 2 in the afternoon.
If the ethical considerations of poisoning shitty men is an important part of Piers’ development, make it important. Her accepting then freaking out then accepting then freaking out then yelling at her great aunt about it is not emotional or moral development. It’s a boring hokey pokey. Her behavior did not cause me as a reader to think about this issue as thorny. It made me think about Piers’ behavior as immature and fucking annoying.
My biggest problem with this book was that for the first two thirds, I couldn’t stop reading it, even when I was ready to pass out from fatigue. I could not WAIT to see where all this was going, how it was going to be resolved. There’s family drama with the witches, there’s family history with Piers that she doesn’t know, there are secrets, there’s poisoning shitty people who deserve it – I was so on board, I should get stateroom credits from Royal Caribbean.
Then all the tension, all the menace, all the danger that’s built up?
Pfft.
Disappears like a bane witch’s poison after the bad man is dead. The building tension in almost every respect was massive, complicated, and scary. The resolutions were anticlimactic and weak. For almost the entire book, the different villains are spectres hanging over the heroine, the safety of her coven, and the secret of the poison witches. The tension grows and grows as they circle the protagonists, moving slowly closer. That slow-build oh-shit tension was ferocious.
And they’re all very, very easily dealt with.
It was like a full orchestra built the fear and peril and danger, and the whole thing ended on a sad trombone fart.
Up until the last third, I felt all the eerie, scary elements as prickles on the back of my neck. I felt a growing sense of dread as the villainy creeped closer while Piers waffled through her own moral misgivings and learned about poisons. The romance was tepid, but I liked how the attraction between Piers and Cop Hero was built on dialogue and engaged conversations.
This book fails for me as a whole because it’s all setup and no fulfillment. Piers as a protagonist is so inconsistent, ignorant, and entirely unfamiliar with nuance or strategy that ultimately the plot structures built around her were too intricate for such a one-dimensional character to solve. I wonder if the other bane witches had meetings about what an idiot she was. The ending was so emotionally flaccid, it might as well have been Bobby Ewing’s dream.
(That’s a deep cut, so if you’re not familiar – in 1986, there was a whole dramatic season of Dallas, an extra soapy evening soap opera, that was revealed to be a dream of one of the characters. None of what happened that season mattered. All the emotions and hope and excitement I’d built over the full season was meaningless. And I had received the privilege of staying up late to watch it that year, and I was pissed.) (This may be my villain origin story.) (Maybe.)
I really struggled with how to review this book because the final third made me SO ANGRY. I felt as if I’d been teased with the prospect of a more complicated, ethically nuanced story. The amoral gifts of the bane witches seemed to invite an exploration of the ethics of murdering terrible men – men who are so terrible they are DRAWN to people who appear alone and vulnerable but who are really waiting to lethally poison them with a fingernail scratch.
But the promise of that story, and the possibility of poisoning lots of Earls who Had to Die, was given to a lead character whose plot development was a roundabout, and who existed more as a device than a protagonist. Piers wasn’t enough of a developed adult to manage the complexity and potential of the plot happening around her. I was so mad, and so disappointed.