Monstrous Women
As I get older, I find myself gravitating more and more to stories of monstrous women. The crones, the murderesses, the ones who will not sit down, will not shut up, won’t think twice about the needful slitting of a throat. The women who’ve been bled of their sweetness, and are dry now of everything but their want and their will.
Women like those in Angela Slatter’s Path of Thorns.
The premise of the story is a familiar one: a young governess comes to live with a mysterious family, and all is not well. There are wolves in the woods, there is a sickly matriarch who clings to her power like she holds onto the years she has left. There are children. There is a beautiful wife. A husband. A house sick with secrets.
And of course, the governess has her own secrets, her own agenda. The town too is clogged with them. Secrets upon secrets, everywhere you look. In many ways, this is a story we’ve all heard before.
Except it really isn’t.
It’s hard to say anything without spoiling an important revelation. Path of Thorns keeps its secrets so close to its chest, they might as well twinned around its ribs. What I can tell you however is that Path of Thorns reverberates with quiet rage. It is angry, so angry at what women must endure to exist in this world. It is enraged at how no amount of cunning or power, no quantity of talent can compare to the ownership of a cock. How women are so often measured by their appeal to men. It grieves for every daughter cannibalized by her mother, and the knowledge of what comes next: the trauma that will haunt these girls for years to come.
“A woman’s life is a path of thorns,” says one of the characters to another. “We walk through it, our feet will always hurt.”
The women in Path of Thorns are absolutely magnificent, staggering in their monstrosity. They are complex and indomitable and incomparable, horrors one and all, molded by their circumstances into creatures more terrible than any they’ve encountered because the only way to survive in this world, the only way to get what you’re owed is to be the bigger predator.
Right?
Path of Thorns, for all its fury, is a book about cycles and the breaking of them. The most powerful moment in the book is when one character discovers the secrets of another. Secrets that are genuinely unforgivable; sins no court would excuse. In another book, in another story, that might have meant the justifiable death of the character.
Here, however, they’re told to go, to leave, to try again, to be better than they were. “Stay safe, do no ill, help where you can — this is the price of my help. Only you will know if you pay it or not,” says one to another.
Our sinner is not, at any point, forgiven for what they’ve done. But they are understood, and they are given what they never had: a chance.
Anyway.
Pre-order the book. You won’t regret it.