“The Dark and the Devil So Close”: Kristi DeMeester’s Historical Feminist Horror, “Dark Sisters” https://ift.tt/IE7NkHF
The archetype of the witch is old, but the archetype of the sinful woman is older. Her story is the first story, we’re told, and thanks to a millennia of appropriative retellings, our images and ideas of the two have become conflated, fatefully braided together. This witch woman, this warning to all women, is perpetual and persistent across so many histories and cultures, patriarchy’s favorite parable, a tale as old as time.
It’s through this archetype that I found myself engaging with Kristi DeMeester’s eerie, propulsive new novel, Dark Sisters, out this month from St. Martin’s Press — a book that is, in many ways, about that first story and how it’s still being used as a blueprint, a cautionary tale for women and girls.
Dark Sisters tugs readers back and forth through time, weaves its plot across centuries, across matrilineages. We’re introduced to Anne Bolton, a woman who, in 1750, armed with old, earthly knowledge of healing plants and herbs, flees her home in the dead of night with her daughter in order to avoid persecution as a witch. We meet Mary Shepard, who in 1953, with her sparkling new washer and dryer, her cinched waist, her house in the suburbs, presents herself as a picture perfect mid-century mother, a model of Southern femininity — though one eaten alive by a secret desire. And we meet Camilla Burson, a preacher’s daughter, who in 2007 is forced to sit stark still every Sunday morning and swallow her rage and father’s fire and brimstone sermons.
Each of these characters are residents of Hawthorne Springs, undoubtedly a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Hester Prynne, literature’s favorite marked woman. Hawthorne Springs is meant to be a distinctly Southern place, a composite, a caricature even, with its humidity and creeping kudzu and small town politics. Its sweet tea and politeness. Its insular awareness, its own imagination of itself. But in the lineage of Stepford, all those manicured lawns, all that beauty, belies something more sinister, chthonic churning underneath.
The families who live in Hawthorne Springs, including Mary’s, including Camilla’s, are bound to the Path, a cult-like evangelical Christianity that demands deference and obedience from its wives and daughters. And for those who step off of the Path, who don’t obey their husbands and fathers, there’s the Retreat, a bodeful re-education program where women and girls are sedated and force-fed Bible verses in order to bring them back into the Lord’s white light.
The book’s narrative momentum comes from the tale within the tale, the story of the eponymous Dark Sisters, passed down from Anne’s generation to Mary’s to Camilla’s to keep women and girls in line. Each of the novel’s main characters lives in the Dark Sisters’ shadow, inside the deadly consequences of its centuries-old curse. The book’s cathartic conclusion comes when one of its finely-wrought main characters finally decides enough is enough.
Dark Sisters is a progeny in this way, one story in a long line of books, films, and other cultural products that explore the ways in which women are often subjugated and punished under the watchful eye of a vengeful Christian god, persecuted for refusing to behave, be small, be quiet.
When I consider Anne Bolton, for example, it’s easy to conjure the convulsive hysteria and febrile suspicion of the early American witch trials as depicted by Arthur Miller in his play, The Crucible.
Mary Shepard lived at a time when movies and television shows like Bell, Book, and Candle and Bewitched showed us beautiful, witchy women who had to give up or tamp down their power, their magic in order to secure the man of their dreams and effectively perform the duties of the conventional housewife — a time when white suburban domesticity was a kind of cult Americana. In fact, if it’s a coincidence that we meet Mary the same year that Miller premiered his play, it is a particularly pointed one.
Camilla came of age in the early aughts, a decade during which purity culture found its mainstream footing with virginal pop music icons. It was a time when campaigns such as “True Love Waits” encouraged teenage girls to promise their bodies to God and their fathers at public purity balls, when tabloid culture was its own kind of witch hunt, burning young women at the stake for behaving badly.
It was also the decade in which DeMeester herself grew up, the author, like Camilla, a member of Fundamentalist and Southern Baptist churches that preached a woman’s body as sin, that did not allow girls to wear pants or makeup, that warned them constantly of the hellfire and damnation that awaited them should they disobey, turn away, from the teachings of the Bible and the men who interpreted it.
DeMeester summons forth these influences and the painful memories of her own upbringing in Dark Sisters to unsettling effect. And if the tropes she deploys feel like familiar staples of the feminist horror genre, I’d argue that is also their power. Because like all of the best horror, we come to understand that the true nightmare in Dark Sisters is not the monster haunting the woods. It’s not some supernatural thing lurking in dark shadows, some centuries-old curse. The most terrifying things about DeMeester’s story are not the Dark Sisters. It’s the misogyny preached from the pulpit. It’s the mundane, everyday violence of the man of the house. It’s the familiarity of these things. It’s the fact that when it comes to violent, patriarchal oppression, there truly is nothing new under the sun.
Indeed, if you lit a candle in the dark, you could summon a shimmering through-line — one that begins long before DeMeester’s Anne Bolton in 1700s, one that goes back and back, all the way to the garden, to that very first story, and snakes its way through tale and time to arrive right here at our current moment.
“The Wicked Witch was supposed to scare us, but she was also created as a warning for women and girls,” says Elizabeth Sankey in her 2024 documentary, Witches. “Women have been taught this lesson for centuries so that now it is embroidered onto our bones, mixed with our blood, tattooed onto our beating hearts. It is in our culture, in all our stories.” If Dark Sisters tells us anything, it is that there is still and always a great and mighty power in women writing and re-writing this one.
FICTION Dark Sisters
By Kristi DeMeester
St. Martins Press
Published December 9, 2025
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