The Antidote: Sometimes great, sometimes befuddling

The Antidote by Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s newest, The Antidote (2025), is at times a great book, is at times a befuddling book, and is, in a few instances, a flawed book. The strengths of the book are many: wonderful character creation; the exploration of gravely important themes such as historical erasure, the treatment of Indigenous people, the shaming of women; a healthy dose of magical realism via a magical camera, a sentient scarecrow, and memory-vault “witches”; and wonderfully rich, vivid description. The issues crop up with regard to character presentation, thematic resolution, pacing, and some (to me) odd authorial decision. In the end, the good outweighs the less good, though I found myself wishing the book had more fully met the teasing potential it so often offered.

The book opens (after a horribly vivid prologue involving a mass slaughter of rabbits) with an historical event, the Black Sunday Dust Bowl storm of 1935 as it sweeps over the town of Uz, Nebraska. It will end with an historical event as well, this one involving rain and floods rather than wind and dust. In between the two, an odd group comes together in service of justice both local and universal, both for a single person locked up in prison and an entire peoples erased from the land.

This group is made up of:

• The Antidote: the “stage name” for a local prairie witch. These witches act as “memory vaults” — people “deposit” the things they wish to forget with the witch and then can, if they choose to, reclaim the memory at a later date (the witches are in a trance so do not actually remember themselves what they’ve been told). Unfortunately for the Antidote, the Black Sunday storm not only tore away the last thin bit of topsoil that remained but also took with it all her stored memories. Now she fears how the townspeople will react once they learn she’s lost their deposits, in particular, the town’s sadistic, violent sheriff, a “savant at torture.”
• Harp Oletsky: a Polish wheat farmer whose land is miraculously untouched by the storm and drought. His farm is the only with wheat, green fields, and somehow, blue sky, something that both mystifies and haunts him.
• Asphodel (Dell) Oletsky: Harp’s 15-year-old niece whom he took in after her mother died, allegedly murdered by a serial killer known as the “Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer” for the mementoes he leaves on the bodies of his victims. She furiously tries to bury her unresolved grief by starring on the local girls’ basketball team and apprenticing herself to the Antidote
• Cleo Allfrey: a Black photographer sent out west as part of FDR’s work programs, her job to “make a case for the New Deal” (so long as she shows the “right” people to stoke public support).

We also get three other POV characters: Harp’s father, a sentient scarecrow whose awakening remains a mystery until the very end (though some readers will certainly guess its origin) and a fierce cat seeking vengeance for the drowning of her kittens. Two other “characters” are important though not actively present: a young man scapegoated for the Rabbit’s Foot killings who has already survived one failed execution attempt and awaits another and the Native Americans (particularly the Pawnee) who lived on the land before being forcibly removed.

The story moves in a semi-linear fashion. Moving forward we have The Antidote and Dell concocting false memory deposits to feed back to The Antidote’s customers, the revelations about the serial killings and the sheriff’s corrupt malevolence, the responses of the town to the ongoing environmental crisis, the mysteries surrounding the sentient scarecrow’s growing self-awareness and Harp’s fertile land, and the discovery by Cleo that a used camera she picked up takes Twilight Zone-like photographs — other times? Other universes?

In between we get a number of flashbacks. One involves The Antidote’s youth when she got pregnant at fifteen and then was sentenced to the abusive Milford Industrial Home for unwed pregnant women (mostly girls), where she gives birth, only to be told her son died that night. She refuses to believe it though, and in fact directs her POV directly to her son, hoping he will find her someday. Through The Antidote’s recollections, we also get the story of Zintkala Nuni, whom The Antidote met at the Home. Zintkala (an actual historical personage) was an infant survivor of Wounded Knee, stolen from her people by a White general, though she eventually ran away. In her time before Milford, she’d been at the Chemawa Indian boarding school, where the students were forbidden their language, dress, and culture, and also worked at a Wild West show. And finally we get a lengthy POV via deposited memory of how Harp’s father had emigrated from Poland in hopes of a better life in America.

The plot therefore is a bit scattered, more an accretion of scenes than a straightforward narrative, and sometimes the structural underpinning or balance seems to slip, leading to some pacing issues and my questioning some of the scenes included (for instance, I’m not sure I needed so much on Asphodel’s basketball team). Some plotlines, such as the unsolved murders, are somewhat abruptly dropped, while others like Harp’s father’s section feel overly long and too “exposition-y.” The same problems arise with a speech Harp gives at the end.

The characters are similarly unbalanced. The Antidote is a fantastic creation, richly characterized across her spectrum of experiences and emotions. Asphodel is also a strong character, whether she is grieving her mother’s murder, trying to find her place in the world, acting as captain for her team, or taking the first tentative steps into love with one of her teammates. Harp is a fine character, a good man who comes to a worthy epiphany, warm and gentle, and it’s a pleasure to see him start to move out of his loneliness, though he pales a bit beside the two women. Cleo comes into the story late, so it’s harder to engage with her, but she also feels like a missed opportunity, with all her cultural/ethnic edges sanded off. Beyond a few scattered references, there’s little sense of her as a Black woman during a deeply segregated and patriarchal decade. FDR’s work programs certainly gave new opportunity to both women and African Americans in the arts, but that’s not to say such opportunity were not remarked upon or always welcome. The same sense of an ahistorical nature hovers over Dell’s queer relationship in that there seems to be little sense of this being unusual or stigmatized at the time.

Thematically, The Antidote explores a number of issues, most predominantly the genocide of Native Americans and the theft of their land, both of which Russell makes clear were calculated acts, not tragic accidents or ripple effects. The “Indian School” where students were forcibly removed from their homes so their culture could be brutally ripped away is one example, as is the time when a group of tourists fire a long-lasting volley from their train at a nearby bison herd, with one yelling, “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone!” The aforementioned memory from Harp’s father also highlights the issue, with obvious parallels drawn between Prussia’s treatment of the Poles (stealing their land, forcing them to relocate, forbidding their language) and America’s treatment of its Indigenous people.

Left at that, the echo might be a bit too ham-handed, but the point here is more subtle and speaks to another theme in the book, that the “evil this world runs on” is “Better you than me.” This is driven home to Harp’s father immediately on his arrival, when he realizes:

Karen Russell

“The Yankees called us a dozen slurs … our inferiority was assumed… A Polack is stupid and coarse and lazy and drunk … My skin is the color an unwashed onion. In America, this placed me ahead of many. On a low rung of the ladder, but higher than the Black porter … I heard the ticking pulse of a new relief: not me, not me not me, Andrew Dawson [their Black porter] — better you than me.

And step by step, over the years, he at first feels bad about what is being done to the Native population of Nebraska, then he stops thinking about it, then he starts to take an active hand in their displacement. As does his wife, who takes a job at the Indian boarding school, and though appalled by the horrors she sees there, remains for the paycheck.

Complicity, even if less active, raises its head in The Antidote’s memories as well, as she has her eyes opened by her friend Zintkala:

I hadn’t known — no one had ever told me — that I was a soldier in a war. We newcomers to the Great Plains were invited out here by the US government to hold ground. The Homestead Act, the Dawes Act all part of a battle plan. Over time, light-skinned children would grow old in this West with … no awareness that they were the daughter and the sons of an invading army … Our lives were entangled in the same song … I was a weapon in the war. I am one. I am in Zintka’s story, as she is in mine.

The treatment of African Americans and women is also addressed. The Home for unwed mothers and its terrible abusive practices is one clear example. As is the generally blasé response to the murdered women (“Women were always going missing. That was a fact of life throughout the howling world”), though unsurprisingly when a few white middle-class women are killed the authorities take more notice and action. Meanwhile, when Cleo sends in pictures of Black people, her supervisor writes back: “In the future, please be judicious about who you frame up. Photographs of White farmers will have much better odds of being circulated.”

The main problem I had with the themes was not in their exploration but their resolution, or non-resolution. Obviously, historical guilt/responsibility is a complex issue, but when it boils down to “we need to do better” or the suggestion of a brainstorming session, and then even that topic gets interrupted by another weather event, it’s more than a little unsatisfying. But I don’t want to go into much detail as this all occurs toward the end.

Other elements were more fully successful. The metaphor of the purposeful erasure of memory via the prairie witches and how America for so long and so often refused (refuses) to acknowledge the truth of its past actions. The dust storm as a metaphor for long buried injustice come for those who profited from that injustice even as they refused to admit that. The actual historic photos that are inserted throughout the text, with the punched-out holes from the editors who rejected them, emblematic of the hole at the center of the told history and of the refusal to accept those considered not “the right people” to pay attention to. The magical realism elements like the magic camera showing what was and perhaps what could be or the poetic scarecrow (some of my favorite segments of the book). The way the town name works on two levels. One as the Biblical name for the land of Job, a man who had everything taken from him and then had it restored (unlike the Pawnee). But more aptly for me the connections with the Land of Oz. We’re in a plain state, we have a young girl protagonist, an unexpected group coming together to pull aside the curtain and reveal truth, a scarecrow, a feisty animal (a cat rather than Toto), and via the camera, the possibility of other times/other lands. And then there is Russell’s prose, which is so often so gorgeous.

The issue noted above nagged a bit throughout the book and unfortunately, marred the ending in particular, which felts paradoxically both overly long and rushed. But the book is still an easy recommendation despite those problems, thanks to its many strengths.