skygiants | (no subject)

For the first few chapters that I read, I was enjoying Ava Morgyn's The Bane Witch, as heroine Piers Corbin heroically Gone Girled herself out of an abusive marriage by faking a combo poisoning-drowning and flailed her injured way north to seek refuge with a mysterious aunt, accidentally leaving a fairly significant trail behind her. Satisfying! Suspenseful! I was looking forward to seeing how she was gonna get out of this one!

Then Piers did indeed get north to the aunt and tap into her Family Birthright of Magical Revenge Poisoning. As the actual plot geared up, the more I understood what type of good time I was being expected to have, and, alas, the more it did, the less of a good time I was having.

So the way the family magic works is that all of the Corbin women have the magical ability -- nay, compulsion! -- to eat poison ingredients and convert them internally into a toxin that they can -- nay, must! -- use to murder Bad Men. It's always Men. They're always Bad. They know the men are Bad because they are also granted magical visions explaining how Bad they are. They absolutely never kill women (there are only ever women born in this family; they have to give male babies away at birth in case they accidentally kill them with their poison, and I don't think Ava Morgyn has ever heard of a trans person) or the innocent!

...except of course that the whole family is actually threatening to kill Piers, to protect themselves, if she doesn't accept her powers and start heroically murdering Bad Men. But OTHER THAN THAT they absolutely never kill women, or the innocent, so please have no qualms on that account! Piers' aunt explains: "Yes, Piers. Whatever has happened to you, you must never forget that there are predators and there are prey. We hunt the former, not the latter."

By the way, both irredeemably Bad Men that form the focus of Badness in this book -- Piers' evil and abusive husband, and the local serial killer who is also incidentally on the loose -- are shown to have been abused in childhood by irredeemably Bad Women, but we're not getting into that. There are Predators and there are Prey!

The book wants to make sure we understand that it's very important, righteous and ethical for the Cobin family to keep doing what they're doing because everybody knows nobody believes abused women and therefore vigilante justice is the only form of justice available. There are two cops in the book, by the way. One of them is the nice and ethical local sheriff who is Piers' love interest, who is allowing her to help him hunt the local serial killer despite being suspicious that she may have poisoned several people. The other is the nice and ethical local cop investigating her supposed murder back home, who is desperate to prove she's alive because she saved his life and he's very grateful. He understands about abuse, because his name is Reyes and he's from the Big City and his mother and sister were both abused by Bad Men. The problem with these good and handsome cops is that they're actually not willing enough to murder people, which is where Piers comes in:

HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: You don't want to help me arrest him, do you? You want to kill him.
PIERS: Doesn't he deserve it?
HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: That's not for us to decide.
PIERS: Isn't it? This is our community. You're an authority in maintaining law and order, and I'm a victim of domestic and sexual violence. Surely, there is no one more qualified than us.

This book was a USA Today bestseller, which does not surprise me. It taps into exactly the part of the cultural hindbrain that loves true crime, and serial killers, and violence that you can feel good about, in an uncomplicated way, because it's being meted out to Unquestionably Bad People. Justice is when bad people suffer and die. We're not too worried about how they turned out to be bad people. There are predators, and there are prey.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

pauraque

This is the exact same reason I hated the one Annalee Newitz book I read, which also proposed a moral structure based on Killing Bad Men and did not worry about why the protagonist was qualified to decide which men were Bad. (I know they are not your favorite author either, though I think we read and hated different books by them.)

From:

skygiants

asdlfkjdj but it doesn't surprise me at ALL that this is another Annalee Newitz failure mode based on the one book I did read!!

From:

ambyr

Yes. I am not a fan of this sort of book.

From:

skygiants

Probably salutory in a way for me to be reminded how many of this sort of book there are

From:

brownbetty

the sort of "virtue is when it's us" view of ethics is very prevalent, but rarely so naked!

From:

skygiants

not a single item of clothing on that emperor

From:

themis1

Thank you for the warning; I won't attempt to read this book!

From:

skygiants

Many people seem to have enjoyed it but it certainly wasn't for me!

From:

hilarita

+1 on "this doesn't sound like a book I want to read". Thanks for reviewing.

From:

skygiants

this was one of the ones where I was angrily writing the post in my head as I read it for sure

From:

movingfinger

This is reminding me of Tepper and not in a good way. Thank you for taking the time to read this and write it up.

From:

skygiants

SJD:LKFJDF IT IS LIKE TEPPER

From:

white_hart

I will definitely be heeding the warning. (Also, from a UK-based perspective, there is absolutely no way I could take a book whose protagonist is called Piers Corbin seriously, as the former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has a climate-denying, antivaxxer brother called Piers...)

From:

davidgillon

he former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has a climate-denying, antivaxxer brother called Piers...)

I couldn't figure out what was disturbing me about the name! (Well, over and beyond Piers being a habitually male name in the UK).

From:

ethelmay

I've never heard of a female Piers in the US either. I ran into a character called Beatrice Sparks the other day, and while that wasn't the only thing that kicked me out of the book, it definitely contributed.

From:

skygiants

omg thank you I had no idea and that's hysterical

From:

rachelmanija

Not that there aren't bad people I'd love to poison, but of course I'm one of those people to others so I like this kind of setup to have that kind of complication.

From:

skygiants

right, like I'm anti-death penalty in real life but also not opposed to engaging in a little 'some people just need to die' in fiction, but I get very suspicious when it seems like a book really doesn't want me asking any questions about how exactly we decide when a person Needs to Die!

From:

sushiflop

The irony of having your unproblematic just Unquestionably Good love interest be a cop, in this context...

From:

skygiants

RIGHT. RIGHT?? RIGHT!!!!

From:

vass

Ooof. Thank you for the warning: this book was not on my radar before, but now it's marked on my radar in the same way that sharp rocks are.

From:

skygiants

I did end it feeling a bit like I'd hit my head on a sharp rock!

From:

osprey_archer

I'm always fascinated (though not fascinated enough to read the book) when books like this have elements that very clearly SHOULD complicate their message, like the Bad Men who were abused as children by Bad Women, or the fact that both of the actual cops shown in the book are Nice and Ethical and Opposed to Bad Men... and the book just refuses to engage with its own text. Should we also be worried about Bad Women? Should we try to reform the system (which is apparently full of Nice Cops anyway?) so the Bad Men can actually have trials? NOPE, moving on to the murder of Bad Men!

From:

selki

books like this have elements that very clearly SHOULD complicate their message, [...] and the book just refuses to engage with its own text.

Yeah, yeesh!

From:

skygiants

Right! The fact that it's so completely uncritical of its own premise means that the elements that includes which should be critical just make the whole thing feel cartoonish and a little bit insulting -- you've given me all the tools to argue with you! Why don't you think I'm going to argue with you??

From:

i_wish_to_remain_nameless

Strangely I think that this kind of revenge fantasy stuff goes down easier for me if it's willing to sit with the moral greyness inherent to the premise rather than just glossing over all the troubling moral implications.

Edited Date: 2026-01-21 12:59 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

same! I'm much more willing to roll with something messy if you let us all marinate a little in the fact that it's messy!

From:

mneme

Yeah. Let us address the concept and acknowledge that it's deeply problematic but it's the best we can do FOR NOW, or seep it in humor and let it Just Happen that only Bad Men get killed off while Bad Women get to be disappointed but don't die and our nice heterenormative couple consisting of one murderer and one non-murderer get to sail into the sunset and stop murdering people (thank you, (spoilers for a 1960s movie I guess?) Assassination Bureau)? Sure.

But if you want me to buy your revenge fantasy with delusions of grandeur, you might need to dress it up a bit rather than assuming I'm in your faithful "the system will always be against us so murder is the answer" club complete with not allowing for any -other- axes of oppression.

Thanks for the disrecomendation! Sadly the main audience for this kind of book is, I suspect, unlikely to write fixup fiction for it!

From:

sovay

It's always Men. They're always Bad.

I missed this review at the time, but regret nothing about missing the existence of the book. It's amazing how much utterly regressive gender essentialism can be packed into a narrative so long as it checks the tickybox marked "empowerment!"