The Poison Thread - Full Batshit Crazy Spoilers!!
The best part about my library habits are that I have so many books on hold, I genuinely forget why I put a book on there. I picked up The Poison Thread by Laura Purcell and just dove in blind and holy fuck you guys…..I can’t stop thinking about it.
I’m going FULL spoilers because I HAVE to talk about this so be warned.
Premise:
Dorothea is wealthy, unmarried, and still dealing with the unexpected loss of her mother years ago. Dora spends her time meeting in secret the man she wishes to marry and doing charity work. One of her big causes is the woman’s prison she helped fund. In her private time she is obsessed with studying phrenology and believes a person’s skull can predict the type of person they are, including a murderer. She goes to the prison and studies the women, measuring their skulls, and talking with them. Then she meets Ruth, a young woman who is convinced her sewing has killed many people. Ruth confides in Dora her strange tale and Dora tries to come to term with her own life while trying to understand Ruth.
“One never knows what to expect with a murderer.”
mood board for the story, original images found on weheartit
What I loved (full spoilers):
Ruth, Ruth, Ruth. What a fucking wild story. She truly believes that when she sews clothes that she can harm someone with the garments. It starts when she’s young and her mother becomes pregnant, Ruth takes over the sewing work from her. She secretly builds herself a corset and spends the time sewing thinking about how she wishes she was stronger, more beautiful, and braver. When she finished the corset she puts it on and finds herself stronger, she also finds that the corset won’t come off. That’s when she decides that what she thinks about while she sews, gets put into the garment.
In one of the most horrific scenes in the book, Ruth is forced to help her mother give birth. Her father cuts her mother’s vagina open more so they can pull the baby out. Ruth then has to sew her shut. It’s a horrifying scene that is described grotesquely and made me totally gag. Ruth is asking for blindness while she sews the skin shut, begging to not remember this horrifying scene. Unfortunately, that causes her mother to become blind instead. And later she makes a little blanket for her new baby sister with an angel figure on it. Her sister then succumbs to the strangling angel – a type illness that could affect newborns and cause them to choke.
There’s so many horrifying scenes in this book and Ruth tells the stories almost nonchalantly. I think for me, putting the birthing scene aside, the most horrifying moment in this book is when Ruth is living at the seamstress’ home; Mrs Metyard. Her and her daughter make clothing for the women in town, but in reality they have five orphans in the back who do all the work, including Ruth. It’s a very Charles Dickens kind of scenario. But Mrs. Metyard is genuinely insane, and we find that out in the most chilling way. Ruth is being punished and has her hands tied and her body hanging from a hook. We’ve learned that Mr. Metyard died in the war but somehow Mr. Metyard is here in the room, smoking a cigar and berating Ruth. Until Ruth gets a good look and realizes this is actually Mrs. Metyard in a wig and her dead husband’s clothes pretending to be him. The way Purcell describes it is stunningly terrifying as you read about the true madness of this woman.
Dora as a character is quite bland, I’m not sure if this was on purpose. I definitely looked forward more so to Ruth’s chapters than Doras. She spends most of the book worrying about the man she wants to marry and the suitors her father sets her up with and her future step mother. Which is pretty realistic for that time. Wealthy women were more concerned with the way they were perceived over anything else. Whereas Ruth, an orphan with no money, focuses more on survival. It’s an interesting contradiction to have in the book, but Dora is still quite bland to start. It took me awhile to warm up to her.
The ending….THE FUCKING ENDING. It’s one of those fake out endings that’s so flawlessly pulled off I had to re-read the final paragraphs because my brain couldn’t fathom it all. We spend the novel unsure if Ruth is really killing people with her clothes, Dora certainly doesn’t believe it, and you sort of go back and forth. It’s definitely a long span of bad luck if it isn’t Ruth killing these people unconsciously. But by the end you’ve accepted the fact Ruth does not have dangerous magic inside of her. And when it’s revealed that two other characters had actually committed the murder that we spend the whole booking thinking it was Ruth’s doing, it’s a shock. Ruth really wasn’t to blame, she’s innocent. But then…BUT THEN…in the very last pages in a beautifully done ending, we realize Ruth really did have power all along. And Dora uses it to her advantage in the most satisfying way.
“It’s in the sewing room that I’m the most dangerous.”
Overall
I could talk about this book for HOURS. If you’ve read it, hit me up on Twitter or IG so we can discuss because this is like nothing I’ve really read before. Or more so….it’s like stuff I’ve read before but amped up to a level I’ve never experienced. It’s such a complex, multi-layered story that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
I was absolutely blown away by this little story and I highly recommend it to those mystery horror fans out there who like a bit of blood and violence.
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