Kristi DeMeester’s Dark Sisters emerges as a haunting exploration of female power across three centuries, weaving together horror, historical fiction, and a searing critique of patriarchal religious structures. This is the kind of novel that burrows beneath your skin—not through cheap jump scares or gratuitous gore, but through the slow accumulation of dread that comes from watching women trapped in systems designed to destroy them.
The narrative unfolds across three distinct timelines, each connected by a mysterious black walnut tree and the spectral figures known as the Dark Sisters. We meet Anne Bolton in 1750, a healer facing witch trial accusations in colonial America; Mary Shephard in 1953, a housewife navigating a forbidden love affair in the suffocating religious community of Hawthorne Springs; and Camilla Burson in 2007, a preacher’s daughter who begins to unravel the dark truth behind her community’s prosperity. DeMeester doesn’t just alternate between these women—she braids their stories together like the intertwined hair of the Sisters themselves, creating a rope strong enough to hang the men who’ve oppressed them.
The Architecture of Fear
DeMeester’s prose carries a lyrical quality that stands in stark contrast to the brutality of her subject matter. She writes with the cadence of someone who understands that true horror lies not in monsters but in the mundane cruelties humans inflict upon one another. When Anne Bolton describes being accused of witchcraft, the terror isn’t supernatural—it’s the very real knowledge that her neighbors will justify her murder with scripture and sleep soundly afterward.
The 1953 timeline, focused on Mary and Sharon’s clandestine relationship, demonstrates DeMeester’s range as a writer. Here, the horror shifts from overt violence to psychological suffocation. Mary’s world of perfect dinner parties, pristine housework, and enforced heterosexuality becomes its own kind of hell. The author captures the particular anguish of queer love in hostile spaces with devastating precision. When Mary and Sharon steal moments together, the tenderness between them feels both revolutionary and heartbreaking, knowing it exists on borrowed time.
The contemporary thread following Camilla provides the narrative’s investigative spine. As she begins experiencing visions of the Dark Sisters and watches her mother fall victim to a mysterious illness that rots teeth and gums, she becomes a detective piecing together centuries of buried truth. DeMeester excels at portraying Camilla’s evolution from compliant preacher’s daughter to something far more dangerous—a woman who refuses to accept the narratives men have written for her.
Blood, Ritual, and the Weight of History
Core thematic elements include:
The corruption of religious authority and its weaponization against women
The cyclical nature of trauma passed through generations
Blood magic as metaphor for stolen female power and autonomy
The tree as both witness and participant in women’s suffering
Self-betrayal as the ultimate curse—how women police each other to survive
The novel’s central mystery revolves around the mysterious illness afflicting women in Hawthorne Springs and its connection to the Dark Sisters. DeMeester handles this revelation with surgical precision, slowly unveiling a conspiracy that spans generations. The Purity Ball ceremony, presented initially as a quaint if uncomfortable tradition, transforms into something far more sinister. Without venturing into spoiler territory, the truth about what happens to these girls involves a perversion of blood magic that makes your skin crawl precisely because it feels grimly plausible.
The black walnut tree functions as the novel’s beating heart—a witness to centuries of female suffering and resilience. DeMeester imbues it with an ancient, ambiguous power that responds to women’s pleas for protection and prosperity, but at a cost. The magic here isn’t clean or simple; it’s as messy and complicated as the women who wield it, capable of both blessing and curse depending on the darkness carried in their hearts.
Where the Branches Break
Despite its considerable strengths, Dark Sisters occasionally struggles under the weight of its ambitious structure. The frequent timeline shifts, while thematically purposeful, can interrupt the narrative momentum just as a particular thread reaches its emotional crescendo. Some readers may find themselves more invested in one timeline than others—the 1953 sections, with their achingly rendered queer romance, prove particularly magnetic, sometimes making the returns to other eras feel like interruptions rather than continuations.
The novel’s pacing in its middle section drags somewhat as DeMeester lays groundwork for later revelations. While the payoff ultimately justifies this patience, there are stretches where the forward motion stalls in favor of atmosphere and world-building. The 2007 timeline, in particular, takes considerable time establishing Camilla’s constrained world before the supernatural elements fully engage.
Some character motivations, especially regarding betrayals between women, occasionally feel more plot-mandated than organically developed. The reasons women turn on each other in this narrative make thematic sense but don’t always land with full emotional conviction. When Florence betrays her mother Anne, or when Camilla’s mother refuses to acknowledge what she’s seen, these moments read more as necessary genre beats than inevitable character choices.
The Lineage of Literary Witches
Readers drawn to Dark Sisters should also explore:
The Witch Elm by Tana French for similar investigations into family secrets and buried trauma
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia for gothic horror exploring patriarchal violence
The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson for religious horror and feminist rage
Lakewood by Megan Giddings for contemporary horror examining bodily autonomy
The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling for historical gothic horror with dark romance
DeMeester’s earlier work, including Such a Pretty Smile and Beneath, established her as a writer unafraid to examine how horror manifests in gendered violence and bodily autonomy. Dark Sisters builds on these concerns while expanding her scope to encompass historical and intergenerational trauma. Readers familiar with her short fiction collection Everything That’s Underneath will recognize her gift for finding horror in the intimate and domestic spaces where women’s lives unfold.
A Reckoning Three Centuries in the Making
Dark Sisters succeeds as both an indictment of patriarchal power structures and a meditation on female solidarity’s fraught complexity. DeMeester understands that women aren’t simply victims or heroes—they’re survivors making impossible choices in systems designed to pit them against each other. The novel’s power lies in how it refuses easy answers or comfortable resolutions.
The ending delivers on the promise of its premise, bringing all three timelines together in a confrontation that feels both cathartic and earned. Without revealing specifics, DeMeester grants her women agency while acknowledging the steep price of reclaiming stolen power. The Dark Sisters themselves, those ghastly figures with braided hair and bleeding mouths, transform from symbols of punishment into something more nuanced—witnesses, warnings, and ultimately, instruments of women’s collective rage.
This is literary horror that trusts its readers to sit with discomfort, to recognize the mundane terrors lurking beneath religious piety and domestic bliss. DeMeester has crafted a novel that honors the anger of women across centuries while acknowledging the internalized shame that makes us complicit in our own oppression. It’s a book about what happens when women stop betraying themselves and each other, when they embrace both their light and darkness—a reckoning three hundred years overdue.
Dark Sisters isn’t perfect, but its imperfections feel almost appropriate for a novel wrestling with such knotty themes. This is horror for readers who want their genre fiction to examine power, sexuality, and resistance through a specifically feminist lens—readers willing to follow DeMeester into the darkest woods and wait beside that ancient tree to see what emerges.