We Ate the Dark by Mallory Pearson

 

It became clear within the first fifty pages that this was a novel about a bunch of Appalachian witches dealing with a murder and the Powers behind it. I kept reading anyway, and I really regret that choice. It's murky and muddled and the characters are barely distinct from each other and at the end the putatively good characters seem to have sacrificed another world and all the people on it. I wish it hadn't taken over four hundred pages to get to that ending. The fact the author seems to have at least occasionally reached for heightened prose and basically ... failed to get there did not improve things.