Dark Sisters: The Curse of Female Impurity
As you read Dark Sisters, it is impossible to avoid conjuring up comparisons to horror greats, such as Stephen King or Shirley Jackson, who have mastered the ability to make your skin crawl with grotesque images presented in a disturbingly casual way. The witchy horror novel by Kristi DeMeester weaves an interconnected tale of three generations of women battling with matrilineal curses (and blessings) that threaten to rot their bodies from the inside out. Kristi DeMeester, through impressive prose and campy horror goodness, asks the reader to look at the misogyny and quiet shame that runs through religious organizations and the purity culture that they champion. There are many moments of great success throughout this novel; more often than not, I was glued to the page. The plot and narrative momentum were spot-on, and the writing was impeccably detailed and stylized in an authorial voice tinged with sarcasm and dark humor. Dark Sisters is deliciously disgusting, unapologetically over the top, and leaves your skin crawling.
“She had never wanted to be a witch, but she was one now.”
The narrative is split into three timelines, each in a different year: 1750, 1953, and 2007. As the reader begins Dark Sisters, we meet Anne Bolton, the heroine of 1750. Anne is concerned about the hangings of witches in her community and seeks to escape with her daughter, Florence. She has a connection to the magic of the Earth and, in a fun twist of the witch hunt narrative, is actually a witch, eating the heart of a hen at the end of the first chapter in a wish for strength. As the reader follows Anne and Florence’s timeline, the women build a new community that worships a dark and twisted tree with bark that “bent and shifted in the light so they resembled screaming mouths and bloated heads lopped off at the neck” Their story is the catalyst of a series of curse-ridden and bone chilling events that generations of women have to pay the price for.
Next, we meet Camilla, 2007, the teenage daughter of her community’s church leader. This tight-knit town is called “The Path” and has centered its entire culture around purity and the preservation of women’s goodness. Camilla and her family are, oddly, filthy, filthy, rich. “Sundays were for Chanel. For Jesus too, but mostly Chanel,” is the reader’s first introduction to Camilla, and later on the page, we get, “Jesus tap-dancing Christ, she was so sick of perfect.” Pretty quickly, we learn about some weird rituals of the community, such as the Purity Ball, where girls ranging from 11-17 dress up and swear purity to their father and to God (Um, weird). Camilla’s mother, Ada, has an eerie, disjointed memory from her Purity Ball, and has always hoped her daughter would not ever have to attend. Camilla’s desire to rebel against her father, as well as question the dogmatic culture of her community, result in an unraveling of truths that she will have to confront head-on, and with visceral and disgusting detail.
The final heroine we meet is the housewife, and secret lesbian, Mary of 1953. Similar to Camilla, she feels trapped in a life that she does not want, only placated by the love for her daughter. Mary, feeling restless and struggling to confront her sexual desires, gets a job in the city and meets a woman named Sharon whom she instantly falls for. Being that Mary is a member of The Path, the same community of zealots that Camilla later joins, she must keep her second life a secret or face massive consequences. Mary’s story explores the sacrifices and lies that women had to make in an era before much personal choice, acting as the tragic exploration of a time between the founding of The Path and the unraveling of it.
“A Carcass built of rot.”
The strongest piece of Dark Sisters is most definitely DeMeester’s use of language. While reading the novel, I kept recalling Stephen Chbosky’s Imaginary Friend because that story, also, had a bone-chilling matter-of-factness about the body horror it presented. Of the mysterious sickness that plagues the women of Dark Sisters, Demeester writes: “I was a living corpse. A stretch of desiccated skin over stinking bones. A heart shriveled and black but pumping still because she had willed it so.” “The tooth came away easily, blood oozing from the opening where it had once been. The decaying root dangled from its bottom. With it came the smell of spoiled meat. Of sun-heated carrion.” DeMeester clearly has no fear of disgusting imagery and even seems to celebrate its grotesqueness, especially in narratively gratifying moments. There are acts of intentional violence described in brutal detail, if you are into vengeful retribution and women dancing under the raining blood of men. This aestheticism plays into the duality of beauty and of violence that permeates the story, presenting horror as something that can be celebrated if you are not afraid of it. The novel sits, or bathes, in its critique of patriarchal religious structures, mainly through the clever use of language to make the reader scream and chuckle at the same time.
“Even without their tongues, the men screamed.”
Dark Sisters handles purity culture with great care and places it at the center of the generational curse haunting The Path. The women of the novel are asked to be pure, an amorphous, untenable virtue, and the men use their lack of purity as a weapon against them. The narrative explores the way that male leaders distort female intention and desire into a blade to turn against and threaten girls with. The novel posits that God, or power, just is; God or whatever power that is in the world does not have morals or intentions, and it is the people who wield power who create good or evil. I really enjoyed the nuanced look at witchcraft that this idea creates, as it creates a lens of moral greyness to view the characters through, where they are both light and dark at the same time.
The thing preventing Dark Sisters from a five-star review is the way it presents its feminism. The women of this novel are encouraged, by DeMeester’s narration, to accept that sometimes people can be spiteful and jealous; I agree. However, the story has this narrative thread of punishing the women who are oppressed for not being able to fully accept the trauma they have been through. For example, Camilla’s mother cannot remember what happened to her at her Purity Ball, seemingly due to a trauma response, and the book punishes her for not taking up arms against the men of the community. Survival in a patriarchal dictatorship, especially in one as intentionally misogynistic and cult-line as the one presented in Dark Sisters, should not, and can not, only look like Katniss Everdeen levels of teenage angst. There was a muddiness in the way the narrative treated the traumatized women somewhat terribly, punishing them for their oppression, while also creating the men cartoonishly evil for the most part. This is very much a man-hating novel, which I enjoyed and did not mind because of the campy, over the top nature of the narrative, but I could see that being a problem for someone not in the mood to attack the patriarchy. (Camilla also has a male friend named Noah that, frankly, exists for no reason. I do not understand why he’s there, as the only male good guy in the whole novel, when he does nothing that good; his arc culminates in him calling a sexual abuser a “dipshit.”)
“Whatever agony lay in their voices she heard only as music.”
Dark Sisters is a novel of constant dripping horror. It pulls you in quickly with a thorn-covered vine and does not let go until you are looking at the blood dripping down your arms with a perverse pleasure. It does not jump-scare you, but instead lets you feel afraid for, and afraid of, the women whose story it tells. It is gross, grotesque, tragic, even squelching, and it is pretty awesome. As it reaches the climax, things get pretty disturbing, so be warned. Anne, Mary, and Camilla are all complicated, sympathetic characters who you want to see succeed, and possibly kill some men along the way. The timelines present mysteries, such as the titular Dark Sisters, or the Purity Ball, and slowly reveal the answers to you in a very satisfying way. Were there some questions I still had at the end? Yes. But the ride to get to that end was exhilarating.
I would recommend this story to anyone who:
- Enjoys body horror
- Wants a captivating and suspenseful witch story
- Leaves problems for your descendants to deal with
- Wants to throw your freshly baked bread into the woods because you hate your husband
- Dances in the blood of your enemies
You can read Dark Sisters here.
