Guest Post: "The Antidote," by Karen Russell

Today's guest post is written by my friend Sally Mansfield Abbot, the author of "Miami in Virgo," a feminist coming-of-age novel. Set in rural Nebraska during the Dustbowl era, Karen Russell’s "The Antidote" (Knopf, 2025) commingles the lives of some highly original characters. There is Cleo Allfrey, a Black photographer for the New Deal, with a magical camera that photographs the past and the future; Asphodel Oletsky, a 16 year old, six feet tall basketball star; her uncle Harp, a farmer; and a sentient scarecrow with a brain. Then there is the Antidote herself, a prairie witch who absolves the community of its crimes with collective amnesia. First and foremost of these are their collective crimes against the Pawnee, the local Plains Indians. Then there is the malfeasance of a corrupt sheriff . . . But Black Sunday of 1935 reverses all of that. The Antidote can no longer absolve the community of Uz (the U.S.? Oz?), and Nebraska faces a reckoning with history that parallels the grievous damage to the land itself. No longer complicit with their absolution, the Antidote stands to lead them into a reckoning. "The Antidote" is magical realism at its best — revisiting history with a supernatural longhand that reveals the hard truths that traditional history has left out. Russell’s exquisite writing, a continual wonder, powers this masterpiece.