The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Russell, Karen. The Antidote. Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

Harp Oletsky’s earliest memory is of being pushed into a jackrabbit drive as a small boy, watching grown men club trapped rabbits to protect the wheat. In the 1930s, Uz, Nebraska is deep into drought and Depression hardship, and many residents rely on a prairie witch known as the Antidote, who takes memories on deposit so that people can keep going without carrying the full weight of what they have lived through.

On Black Sunday, a massive dust storm swallows Uz. The Antidote wakes chained in Sheriff Vick Iscoe’s jailhouse, and she panics when she realizes the storm has emptied her of the memories she has been holding. With her deposits gone, she fears the run that will come when customers demand withdrawals she cannot perform. Once the winds ease, she sends a telegram to Cherry Le Foy, a fellow prairie witch along the Republican River, hoping Cherry escaped the storm and can tell her whether other witches have lost their deposits too, and what the storm has done to the witches’ trade. When no answer comes, the Antidote fears Cherry is missing and that Uz will soon come looking for her.

Outside town, Harp struggles to keep his dryland farm alive. His sister Lada died years earlier, and Harp has been raising Lada’s daughter, Asphodel Oletsky, called Dell. Dell throws herself into basketball and dreams of a future beyond Uz. Harp, cautious and withdrawn, cannot ignore that one of his fields remains strangely green while other farms fail, and the “miracle” crop draws attention from townspeople desperate for proof that the land can still be trusted.

Uz is also terrified by a string of killings. Women’s bodies are found in the dunes beyond town, and the Sheriff and his deputy, Percival Gander, claim they are hunting a murderer. They target Clemson Louis Dew, an itinerant violinist and outsider with few allies. The town’s fear turns into certainty, and the case becomes tangled with the Sheriff’s reelection campaign and with the community’s need to believe the violence can be contained if a single culprit is punished.

A young drifter named Willa becomes the Antidote’s assistant. Willa hides during appointments, takes notes, and learns how the Antidote’s earhorn and trance can preserve a memory and later return it. Convinced that Uz is blowing apart because people are leaving and losing hope, Willa proposes a scheme: instead of returning what customers originally deposited, they will write new memories and plant them in those who come to withdraw. The Antidote, desperate for cash and protection, lets Willa guide the plan.

Dell seeks the Antidote’s help to manage her grief and confusion, and she becomes fascinated by the idea of being a “Vault” herself. Meanwhile, Harp uncovers evidence that his family has its own buried secret. He finds a deposit slip indicating that his father, Tomasz Oletsky, once entrusted an important memory to another witch, the Counselor of Genoa, and Harp pursues the deposit in hopes of understanding his father and the land they work.

A federal photographer, Cleo Allfrey, arrives to document the Dust Bowl and the surprising survival of Harp’s crop. As Allfrey photographs the farm and the town’s widening damage, she becomes close to Harp and Dell and is pulled into the murder case. Dell learns how images and captions can shape what outsiders believe about the Plains, while Willa begins manipulating records and photographs as readily as she manipulates memories.

Dew is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The Sheriff encourages the town to cleanse itself of doubt by using the Antidote, and the Antidote is pulled into the machinery of the conviction as people connected to the case deposit their uncertainty, pity, and fear. Dew is taken to the electric chair, but the execution is botched and he survives, badly burned. The state prepares to kill him again, and the approaching second execution forces those who suspect he is innocent to act quickly.

The Antidote is eventually forced to take deposits from Sheriff Iscoe and Deputy Gander themselves. In those memories, she learns that the lawmen have been hiding their own crimes and steering the investigation away from themselves. The deposits reveal how evidence was staged and how Dew was selected as a scapegoat. With this knowledge, the Antidote understands that the Sheriff will destroy her if she becomes a threat, and she turns to Harp, Dell, Willa, and Allfrey for help.

The allies decide to confront Uz publicly. At a packed meeting in the Grange Hall, they present testimony and photographs naming the murdered women and linking the Sheriff and his deputy to the violence. Harp speaks about what the town has lost and about the way fear has been used to turn neighbors against a vulnerable stranger. Dell explains what Allfrey’s photographs show, and the Antidote and Willa offer proof drawn from deposits and from the Sheriff’s own hidden story. As the crowd erupts, the Sheriff is nowhere to be found, and the meeting turns from rally to reckoning.

In the aftermath, Harp and his allies work to push their evidence beyond Uz in hopes of stopping Dew’s second execution and forcing an official reckoning with the murders. At the same time, the Antidote faces the personal history she has spent years trying to keep submerged, including her life before Uz as Antonina Rossi and the losses that shaped her. With the land still unstable and the town’s future uncertain, Uz is left to decide what it will remember, what it will admit, and what it will try to forget.