The Antidote by Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s newest novel THE ANTIDOTE, is a brilliantly imagined story of a Prairie Witch set in Nebraska during the dustbowl. Bookended by two real weather events that happened within months of each other in Western Nebraska: the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River, Russell creates a historical, supernatural, and slightly weird tale with a poignant message.

There are five alternating narrators in this book. One of which is a scarecrow. The others include:

Antonina Rossi, self named the Antidote, is a Prairie Witch. She serves as a bank vault for the bad memories and secrets of her neighbors in Uz, Nebraska, which are immediately forgotton after spoken into the Prairie Witch’s supernatural ear horn. When the dust storm blows through on Black Sunday, she finds herself bankrupt, unable to recall the memories entrusted to her for safe keeping.

Dell Oletsky is a high school basketball player who comes to live with her Uncle Harp in Uz after her mother’s death, and becomes an apprentice to the Prairie Witch, though she has no real gift and makes up memories to save her from her neighbor’s wrath when they come to retrieve them.

Harp Oletsky’s farm has miraculously been spared by the dust storms that suffocate his neighbor’s fields, but he is haunted by something in his family history. He harbors the Prairie Witch when she needs to escape and provides a home for his orphaned niece.

Cleo Affley is a government photographer sent to document the devastation of Black Sunday. After her camera is stolen, she purchases one she finds in a pawn shop, along with the chemicals and materials needed to develop the film. As she develops her film, she discovers her photos mysteriously reveal the history of the original people on the land, Native Americans displaced by immigrant homesteaders, as well as alternative futures – earthly heavens or hellscapes – different tomorrows unfolding on the same land.

“What we choose to do today matters greatly for our shared future,” Cleo writes in a letter to her supervisor.

Through the fantastical elements of a Prairie Witch’s ear horn and a government photographer’s time traveling camera, Russell tells a story of the consequences of willful amnesia. A cautionary tale about climate change and revisionist history. An extraordinary work by a phenomenal writer.

Listen to my interview with Karen Russell on March 27 at 7pm and the 29th at 6am on Superior Reads.