Summary

In the weeks after Black Sunday, the prairie witch known as the Antidote stays in her rented room at the County Jentlemen boardinghouse, terrified that the memories she once stored for the people of Uz have vanished from her head. She broods over the baby boy she believes was taken from her years earlier and over the past that made her into the town’s unofficial vault, including the period when a judge sent her to the Milford Industrial Home after she became pregnant as a teenager. In town, Asphodel Dell Oletsky tries to keep her life from blowing apart as the captain of the girls’ basketball team, the Dangers, while she grieves her mother’s murder and hears neighbors insist that Clemson Louis Dew’s conviction should settle the case.

After friends mention the Antidote as a way to get rid of nightmares...