Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery
Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery
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Brom on Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A documentary, a play, and an unanswered questionThe book began with a gap in history rather than a theme. While watching a documentary on the Salem witch trials, Brom encountered the same injustice Arthur Miller had dramatized in The Crucible, which they read immediately after, and both works left the same question open: what if the accusers had been right?
It was while watching a documentary on the Salem witch trials, then shortly after reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, that I became obsessed with how it would’ve been if those accused of witchcraft had actually been witches, and more, if they had a powerful spirit as an ally, how things might have gone.
Once the premise was fixed, Brom faced a structural question that most historical novelists sidestep by building in a contemporary surrogate. The easier path was available: drop a modern character into 1666 to give readers a familiar foothold. Brom considered it seriously and then rejected it, accepting the harder constraint.
I flirted with the idea of a modern connection, someone thrust backwards in time to give it a modern perspective, a relatable point of experience, but in the end, the challenge of a historical perspective won out.
That choice put the full weight of audience sympathy on a seventeenth-century Puritan outcast and a forest spirit with no memory of himself, with no modern voice to translate either one.
How they wrote it
When the illustrator surprises the novelistBrom had spent years as a commercial illustrator before turning seriously to fiction, and by the time Slewfoot was underway, the direction of influence between the two disciplines had reversed from his earlier books. The image no longer comes first.
Early on it was all about what I wanted to paint, but as I’ve grown as a novelist, the uniqueness of an idea or plot tends to lead the creative process, once that is established, I then set the illustrator in me loose to add my twisted dark visuals.
The handoff between writing and drawing was never a clean stop-and-start. During the drafting of Slewfoot, Brom kept evening sketching sessions running alongside the prose, using them not for polish but for discovery, working out what the characters actually looked like before committing to how they behaved on the page.
The illustrator in me will often surprise the writer in me, and vice versa. I love the discoveries that come up when I switch from one discipline to the other. It is the most enjoyable element of the process and it keeps the project fresh for me.
Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), a film set in 1630s New England that treats Puritan dread as atmospheric fact rather than metaphor, gave Brom a specific tonal target. The borrowing was conscious and declared.
I really loved the dark grittiness of Robert Eggers’ movie The Witch, and tried to get a bit of that atmosphere in the book.
Brom’s own note that he writes by seeing story “like a film” makes the Eggers reference more than an acknowledgment of influence: it describes how the book was actually built, scene by scene, in visual terms first.
The personal thread
Burnt out at thirty, and looking for controlBrom did not arrive at novel-writing as a natural extension of a literary education. The move came from exhaustion with the commercial illustration work that had defined his career, and from wanting authority over the full creative object, not just its surface.
Probably early thirties. At that point I was becoming burnt out on illustration and wanted more control over my art, one way to do that was to write my own material.
The aspiration behind that shift was not to trade one discipline for another but to fuse them. Brom had carried this ambition for years before Slewfoot gave it its fullest expression.
I’ve always considered myself a story teller, whether with pictures or words. And my goal has always been to combine the two. A complete artistic vision.
What they want us to sit with
Devils beneath every stoneAsked to describe the book, Brom does not reach for theme or argument. The summary he offers is deliberately kinetic, but its final clause does something the rest of the description does not: it names the social logic that makes all the violence possible.
Blood, tears, witchcraft and mayhem in no particular order. It follows the arc of a young spirited woman with a pagan background who struggles to adapt after being sent to a puritan village. When her husband is murdered, she finds herself all but alone, with one exception, a lost forest spirit who is asking for her help, offering his help in return. But everything comes with a price, especially in a society looking for devils beneath every stone.
Brom’s interest in monsters and demons across his whole body of work is not in their horror but in their point of view. In Slewfoot, that instinct produces a creature labeled a devil who cannot remember what he is and a woman labeled a witch who wants nothing more than to keep her farm, while the certainty about evil belongs to the people doing the most damage.
I really enjoy digging into old myths and legends, especially those of monsters and demons and exploring them from another perspective.
The draw to dark subject matter runs back further than any single book. At its core, for Brom, it is a question of stakes: darkness is not atmosphere applied to a story but the condition that makes the story matter at all.
There is just an inherent drama in ‘things that can hurt you’ that I have always found fascinating.
horrorinblog.wordpress.com, “Artist Interview: Gerald Brom | The Horror In Blog”