In Linda H. Codega’s debut novel, Motheater, Benethea “Bennie” Mattox is on a mission to prove that White Rock, the large mining company Bennie worked for until her recent firing, is behind a string of mysterious miner deaths in the small Appalachian town of Kiron, Virginia. While that might suggest a book with a bone to pick over environmental destruction and corporate greed, an early plot twist makes monsters of mountains and helpless victims of those who mine them.
As the novel opens, Bennie is grieving the loss of her best friend, Kelly-Anne. Both Black women, both White Rock employees, they became fast friends when Bennie moved to mostly white Kiron with her long-term boyfriend, local boy Zach Gresham. Until Kelly-Anne became the most recent White Rock employee to go into the mountain and never come back, she and Bennie were working together to uncover the company’s wrongdoings before any more of their coworkers disappeared without a trace.
After Kelly-Anne’s death, Zach (also a White Rock employee) became even more reluctant to participate in the search for evidence, urging Bennie to keep her head down and stay safe. Eventually, she ended their relationship over it. Increasingly alone and frustrated that no one seemed to care about the trickling disappearance of miners over the last twenty years, “[i]t seemed ridiculous to her that all she wanted was to make it safe to work in the mountain—not even pushing for better environmental regulations or better pay—just basic safety, and she couldn’t get anywhere” (p. 100). Enter Motheater.
On page one, Bennie hauls a half-drowned, unconscious white woman from the river. Her skin and hair are unnaturally pale with green overtones, her teeth are filed sharp, and moths carrying lost souls whisper their final words into her ear before she helps them pass on to whatever comes next. She is an Appalachian Neighbor: a witch. She doesn’t remember much, not even her name—only a nickname, Motheater—and the fact that she has been trapped inside Kire Mountain for 150 years.
She remembered when she finally stopped breathing and let the coal and granite petrify her lungs, the mountain shifting to accommodate her soft body, her fragility, taking care to cradle her heart. The rock had turned her jaw so that she would be comfortable, so that she would be able to endure an eternity bound by the chains of whatever magic it took to force her so deep into Kire. It was like pressing on a bruise, the hurt spreading, her memory coming back in spits and starts. (p. 40)
According to Motheater, she was plunged into the depths of Kire Mountain to subdue its angry spirit. When White Rock miners (Zach among them) pulled her from the rock and ditched her body in the river, they woke up Kire, whose rumbling, rockslide fury now threatens to destroy the town both Motheater and Bennie love.
Motheater is sure she can stop the impending disaster of Kire taking revenge on the people who killed the spirits of nearby mountains by beheading them, and who have been bleeding Kire itself dry for generations, if only she had full use of her powers. To do that, she needs to remember the different places where she left her power before her enmountainment.
From one chapter to the next, the narrative shifts between the point of view of Bennie or Motheater in the present, and Esther, Motheater’s younger self, in the Reconstruction era. Bennie works to help Motheater recover her memory and thereby her full magical abilities, but the source of Motheater’s magic is not entirely clear. She quotes Christian scripture and hymns as she works, crushes small animals in her hand as sacrifices, and as a young girl she made some sort of bargain with Kire for more power—but it seems she already had some to start with. “She had woken Kire when she was a child, and she had paid for it her whole life. This is what happened when witches were made without care” (p. 324).
Esther’s father was a snake-handling preacher with a church built into the side of Kire, which seems to be how she got her magical start, talking to snakes. Even before she bound herself to Kire at the age of fourteen, her father had sufficiently hated her and her magic to want her dead, and eventually he got the next best thing: his hands were among those that shoved her into the rock. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In Esther’s sections, we learn that, as an Appalachian Neighbor, she used her power to heal the people of Kiron, to make their crops grow and fill their traps with enough game to keep them going through the winter. She doused for the veins of coal that would be fruitful without harming Kire and pulled miners from Kire’s clutches when they disregarded her warnings to not dig so deep. Still, she was met with fear and disdain far more often than gratitude or community. She had the social graces of a neurotic bear, a magically-warded property that forbade entry to anyone but her only friend, and a bit of a god complex—casting whatever spell or hex on whomever she chose for her own reasons. Consent was not her thing. She was frightful in appearance and in power, and her father preached against her to anyone who would hear. When representatives of the mining company, Halberd, came to town promising to enrich them all with state-of-the-art mining machinery, Esther was the only voice against them. The town wasn’t interested in what she had to say, though—and so she told the mountain of the danger Halberd posed … and the mountain listened.
Esther’s chapters were probably my favorite sections of the novel, thanks to their vivid and visceral magic, richly rendered historical setting, compelling storyline, and more substantial character development. Bennie’s chapters advance the plot, but left me a little cold. She is an interesting character, and would be more so if she received anything more than just-below-the-surface treatment. As it is, mostly she serves as Motheater’s sidekick, driver, explainer of modern times, slow-burn-to-fizzle romance, and, in the end, inheritor. She spends most of her page real estate disbelieving that what she’s really seeing is magic and telling herself now is not the right time to be having feelings for this woman. Given how much wonderful world-building there is throughout the novel, I wonder if Bennie’s character development suffered from the book already being 404 pages, rather than from the author not knowing this character more deeply.
As I alluded to in the introduction, Motheater’s premise suggests a theme that the plot undermines. After the penultimate battle, when Motheater has stopped Kire’s attack on Kiron by killing the spirit of the mountain, Bennie thinks: “All those homes, crushed under a righteous indifference. Kire deserved revenge, but Kiron deserved forgiveness. Who decided who died under the mountains?” (p. 387). But the people of Kiron never asked for forgiveness. Not back when they turned on their witch and shoved her into the mountain to get her to stop interfering with industry, and not now that they continue to bleed Kire for the fossil fuels that are destroying the planet. There is no accountability, no attempt to make amends. There is just another dead mountain. And let’s not forget that, even in the world of the book, mine collapses kill plenty of miners without the help of murderous mountain spirits. White Rock will continue causing the destruction of the local and global environment, along with the fast or slow deaths that come for most miners eventually.
The theme that emerges, then, seems to be that when it comes to a choice between humans continuing to do exactly what they want to do and the environment fighting back, the answer is to support humans no matter what. The novel’s tagline is literally: “Nature won’t be subdued forever. Which Side Are You On?” It’s the same false dichotomy that Republicans use to kill pro-climate policies and funding, and it’s a preposterous notion for a book published in 2025. What’s going to happen to the people of Kiron when a climate change superstorm bears down on them? We already have glimpses: Hurricane Helene just flooded North Carolina, killing over one hundred people, devastating communities, and leaving its citizens without clean drinking water for seven weeks. [1] Not being on the side of nature is the same thing as not being on the side of humans.
I have tried to come up with a more generous reading of the novel’s meaning and the best I can do is: There’s no point in being angry at the hardworking folks who continue to throw their lot in with greedy, destructive businesses and the people responsible for them. They are just trying to survive, after all. As she recovers her memories, Motheater blames herself for Kire’s anger with the people of Kiron. “She had told Kire to hate Halberd in spells and furious whispers at town halls and it had listened to its witch. But what did Kire know between industry and your average folk? It was a thing without discernment, and now more people were going into the mines” (p. 326). Average folk, it seems, are not responsible for the consequences of their actions.
As I write this, Trump has appointed fourteen billionaires to his cabinet and most of them will be approved. Lee Zeldin, his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, voted against clean air and water legislation at least eighteen times as a member of the House of Representatives. I just don’t see how obviating accountability for their actions will help the average folks who continue to bolster the people and industries that are steering the planet into a death spiral.
It might not seem like it, but I am loath to offer this review of a clearly talented debut author. Codega’s descriptions of the magic being done in and through the natural world are vivid and exciting and their writing in general is lush, imaginative, and interesting. Their clear affection for the people and environs of Appalachian Virginia is undeniably part of this novel’s charm, as is the vibrant portrayal of Reconstruction-era Virginia. I think the weaknesses of Motheater are a case of plot running roughshod over craft elements like character development and theme, and that’s a shame. For many readers, the magic and plot will be exactly what they’re looking for, but, if stories really do matter, they matter because of the meaning we make from them.
Give me the people joining the mountain in turning on the real enemy. Heck, give me the industry folks having a change of heart if that’s on your liberation bingo card. But don’t give me a story about environmental destruction and community survival in which the only people who have any real agency or responsibility are a lone witch and her mountain dupe run amok. It’s too hot out for that.
Endnotes
[1] Alas, even in the brief period between when I wrote this review and today, we have been given the LA fires as a further example. [return]