Slewfoot by Brom: Fear, beauty, and the devil in Puritan New England
Slewfoot is terrifying in the way the best fairy tales are terrifying, where horror and beauty keep feeding into each other until you can’t separate them anymore.
I came to it expecting something dark and folkloric. What I found was something more alive than I anticipated.
It also belongs comfortably beside modern folk horror and Colonial Gothic fiction, where religion, landscape, and fear become inseparable.
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Set in 1666 Connecticut, Slewfoot follows Abitha, a young woman newly arrived in a Puritan settlement where the rules of survival are both rigid and cruel.
When an ancient spirit awakens in the surrounding woods, neither demon nor god, their paths collide in ways neither the spirit nor the settlement is prepared for.
Brom’s background as a painter is visible on every page. The prose is sensory and dense, attentive to texture and shadow in the way a visual artist notices things a different kind of writer might not.
The Puritan world feels genuinely constructed, pressing down on every character in ways they barely notice because they were born inside it.
The novel also understands something many witchcraft narratives miss: Puritan fear was never abstract. It was social, theological, and tied directly to survival.
Brom never hurries the story, even when the novel turns violent.
He moves between perspectives, Abitha’s, the spirit’s, and the settlement’s collective dread, without losing coherence.
The spirit’s sections are what gave the novel weight for me. Ancient, confused, and slowly learning what it is through its actions, the spirit becomes something more emotionally complex than a simple supernatural threat.
The dark humor is there too, though it arrives quietly. This is a book that knows when to be funny and when to let the silence back in.
The relationship between Abitha and the spirit is at the center of the novel. Two beings at the edges of their respective worlds, finding each other across a distance neither has language for.
That dynamic is what makes the horror matter. Not because it’s frightening, though it is, but because it’s carrying something emotionally real.
I also kept thinking about the Puritan community itself. Brom doesn’t caricature it. The fear, cruelty, and occasional kindness all feel recognizably human.
That restraint makes the story considerably more disturbing than a simpler treatment would.
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Related reading
If this worked for you, continue with Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, or the guide to Best Gothic horror novels that still feel disturbing.
You could also move into Best haunted house books, Scariest horror novels ever written, or the broader Gothic literature hub.
