Slow Funeral did not get lost in my reviewing pile — a pile now just small enough that our two felines aren’t in mortal danger from getting caught in a catquake that might bring down the pile! (Don’t laugh: this pile was once large enough that a fifth of Glenmorangie whisky got hidden for months! And that was a damn shame as this is very fine sipping whisky!) No, it’s been in our library for some time now and me thought was that it should be reviewed. Slow Funeral is one of those Autumn novels that one reads to invoke the feel of the Appalachian Highlands, where the magic and mystery are as real as the bittersweet taste of rhubarb fresh from the garden, or the sound of a murder of crows gathering overhead during a funeral. This is not the clean, neatly packaged magic of the modern Witches, but the old, deep,and often dark magic that is old as the Hills themselves — or perhaps even much older.
Rebecca Ore says of herself that she “was born in Louisville, Kentucky and grew up in South Carolina before fleeing to New York where I went to Columbia University’s School of General Studies, took buildings hostage with the help of radical friends, and generally spent time in the city. I’ve now lived in the Philadelphia area for five years. Philadelphia is to cities what Floyd, Virginia, is to country — tolerant, beautiful, and cheap.” If this novel’s any indication, she, like Sharyn McCrumb, certainly has a fine grasp of the Appalachian culture.
Bracken County, nestled in the Blue Ridge region of the Appalachian Mountains, is quite unlike any other place on Earth. Behind its apparently quiet facade of small-town Southern life, magic works rather effectively — far too effectively — and corrupts everything that it touches. Maude Fuller, now resident on the West Coast, has been running very hard from her destiny as a witch for a long, long time. Now Maude’s grandmother is dying and she must go home, as Bracken County is quite literally calling her home. Maude’ll try anything to save granny’s soul — and I do mean [ital]anything to save her! Yes, this is gothic horror, Southern style!
All you need to know is that magic may well be rampant in Bracken County, but barely exists elsewhere, so Maude is the only (!!!) witch in Berkeley (now there’s a true fantasy!) and she left Bracken County largely to escape the curse of being a witch. Hell, she’s fucking an engineer, a man who knows in his very soul that the Universe isn’t governed by magic, but rather has a scientific basis. But Bracken County is definitely not part of that reality as magic really does rule there. (The motif in fiction of witches in rural Appalachian communities is a deep one in our culture. Even the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series has Tara, a character whose rural mountain-born-and-raised family believes all the women in that family are witches.) So she comes home — very reluctantly — to a place where falcons are much more than mere birds and the DEA choppers looking for marijuana meet a rather messy fate.
Maude will in the end discover just how strong the witcheries of Bracken County are. She will also become painfully aware that one’s roots cannot be denied if one is a witch born and bred, for the blood of witches is far thicker than the blood of mundane folk. This novel is considered a ‘feminist’ novel but it really is much better than this appellation would lead one to believe, as what it really is is a novel with strong, intelligent female characters. The magic of family, quilting, shotguns, cockfights, moonshine, and very strange grandmothers is woven together in a way that is both riveting and complex.
(Tor, 1994)
