Introduction
Erin Brown’s “Garden of the Bloodpotter,” published in Psychopomp Magazine in September 2025, represents a significant contribution to contemporary dark fantasy literature, particularly within the tradition of feminist revisionist fantasy that interrogates power, bodily autonomy, and the economics of magical violence. As a Black, neurodivergent author and SFWA member, Brown brings marginalized perspectives to bear on familiar fantasy tropes, creating a narrative that is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a critique of war economies, and a meditation on love’s capacity for both salvation and destruction. This review argues that “Garden of the Bloodpotter” succeeds in its subversion of necromantic fantasy conventions through its unflinching examination of exploitation and complicity, though its ambitious thematic scope occasionally strains against the constraints of the novelette form.
Summary
Set during an endless,magically sustained war known as the King’s War, the narrative follows Hen, a seven-year-old beggar child in the impoverished village of Fauen, who encounters a mysterious War Sorcerer called a Bloodpotter. These sorcerers practice a form of necromancy that sustains elite soldiers called HighSoldiers by resurrecting them repeatedly from gardens cultivated from human remains. The Bloodpotter initially selects Hen as a sacrifice for such a garden but instead transforms her into his apprentice, renaming her Omen. Over a decade, Omen masters the medical and magical arts while the Bloodpotter heals the village, ending taxation and bringing prosperity. This peace shatters when the Bloodpotter resurrects his HighSoldier lover, whose warrior nature and magical thrall seduce many villagers—including Omen’s friend General—into joining the war. The story concludes with the village’s destruction and Omen’s transformation from apprentice to autonomous practitioner, walking away from the ruins with the knowledge and terrible purpose to continue the Bloodpotter’s work.
Critical Analysis
Thematic Exploration
Brown’s narrative operates on multiple thematic registers, with the concept of commodification serving as its central organizing principle. The story systematically explores how war economies transform human beings into resources: children become soldiers or sacrifice, bodies become gardens, love becomes leverage, and healing becomes extraction. The Bloodpotter’s initial assessment of Hen—whether she represents “a good omen or a bad one”—encapsulates this reductive logic, while his later confession that he intended to “fatten her up” before using her as fertilizer makes the agricultural metaphor horrifyingly literal.
The garden itself functions as the story’s master symbol, representing simultaneously creation and consumption, love and violence, agriculture and necromancy. Brown’s innovation lies in making the garden a site of ethical complexity rather than simple monstrosity. The soil that grows the HighSoldier is enriched by the Bloodpotter’s medical interventions in the village—every healed wound yields tissue samples, every repaired tooth contributes to the substrate. This creates a parasitic economy disguised as mutual aid, wherein the villagers’ gratitude obscures their exploitation. The narrative thus interrogates the ethics of colonial medicine and development programs that extract resources while providing services, a reading supported by the detail that tax collectors are “often enough nicer to the beggar children than the villagers were.”
The theme of complicity receives particularly sophisticated treatment through Omen’s narrative arc. Her transformation from Hen to Omen marks her incorporation into the Bloodpotter’s magical economy, but Brown refuses simple victim/perpetrator binaries. Omen actively participates in harvesting from the villagers, justifying this through her love for the Bloodpotter and the genuine improvements to village life. Her final decision to continue the Bloodpotter’s work—to “grow a garden” herself—represents not victimization but agency exercised within constrained circumstances, echoing scholarly discussions of survival and resistance under oppressive systems.
Form and Style
Brown employs a deceptively simple third-person limited narration that evolves alongside its protagonist, beginning with the concrete, sensory perceptions of a seven-year-old and gradually incorporating more sophisticated magical and ethical vocabulary. This narrative strategy allows readers to experience Omen’s education alongside her, naturalizing the horrific through familiarity—a technique that mirrors the normalization of violence within the story world.
The narrative structure follows a classical bildungsroman pattern, divided into numbered sections that mark stages of Omen’s development, bookended by a prologue and epilogue that provide broader historical context. This framing establishes the story as simultaneously personal narrative and historical case study, suggesting that Omen’s experience exemplifies rather than exceptional. The prologue’s detached, almost anthropological tone—describing “rarer sights” and “it was said”—contrasts sharply with the intimate third-person narration that follows, creating productive tension between individual experience and systemic violence.
Brown’s prose style demonstrates remarkable range, shifting registers from the spare, almost folktale-like opening (“She was called Hen by the villagers”) to the lush, sensory descriptions of the Bloodpotter’s possessions (“carpets and rugs than Hen thought could have existed in the world. Their designs were intricate and beautiful”) to the visceral horror of magical transformation (“hundreds of clawed fingers, becoming a kind of clay”). This stylistic flexibility serves thematic purposes, with beauty and horror existing in uncomfortable proximity, much like the Bloodpotter himself combines healing and harm.
The story’s pacing deserves particular attention for how it manipulates readerly sympathy. Brown devotes substantial narrative space to establishing the Bloodpotter’s genuine kindness toward Omen and improvements to village life before revealing the exploitative foundation of this benevolence. By the time readers understand the full horror of the garden’s composition, they—like Omen—have been seduced by comfort, beauty, and care. This formal strategy implicates readers in Omen’s complicity, a sophisticated meta-textual gesture.
Characterization
The Bloodpotter emerges as the story’s most complex creation, simultaneously victimizer and victim, lover and manipulator, healer and harvester. Brown avoids reducing him to simple monstrosity by revealing his own exploitation within the war economy—stolen from his family as a child, trained through “bloodshed, pain, and Pathflower,” and condemned to repeated separations from his beloved HighSoldier. His confession to Omen that “Bloodpotters rarely love” situates his exploitation of her within a broader system that has denied him healthy attachment, creating what trauma theorists might recognize as a cycle of abuse without excusing his actions.
Significantly, Brown grants the Bloodpotter genuine evolution. His decision to spare Omen and use the village collectively rather than sacrificing her individually represents meaningful moral development, however compromised. The detail that “he had grown tired, sloppy, and lonely” suggests that his exploitation of Omen paradoxically made him more human, more capable of ethical reasoning. This creates productive ethical ambiguity: is his decision to spare her truly moral growth, or merely a different form of selfishness?
Omen’s characterization succeeds through its refusal of passivity. Even as a child, she possesses agency—she “did not leave” when other children flee the Bloodpotter, she “carefully pulled a little bit of the cloth away” to make herself comfortable, she “loved every task.” Brown presents Omen’s attachment to the Bloodpotter as psychologically complex: trauma bonding, yes, but also genuine intellectual fulfillment, escape from starvation and abuse, and the intoxicating experience of being valued. Her journey toward independent magical practice represents both liberation from and replication of her master’s violence, a characterization choice that reflects the ambivalent legacies of mentorship under oppressive systems.
The HighSoldier functions more as force than fully realized character, which appears deliberate. Brown presents him as increasingly consumed by his warrior nature with each resurrection, losing personality and retaining only “bloodlust and violent pride.” His seduction of the villagers through magical thrall—the “smell of the garden soil” that accompanies his war songs—literalizes the ways militarism recruits through affect and spectacle rather than rational persuasion. General and the other villagers who follow him to war lack individual agency in this moment, transformed into extensions of the HighSoldier’s will, which serves as the story’s clearest indictment of militaristic violence.
Cultural and Theoretical Context
“Garden of the Bloodpotter” participates in several literary traditions while offering distinctive innovations. Within the necromantic fantasy tradition extending from classic texts through contemporary works, Brown’s contribution lies in making necromancy explicitly economic and colonial. The story’s war economy, sustained through magical extraction from peripheral territories, allegorizes historical and contemporary resource extraction from colonized or economically marginalized regions.
The narrative engages productively with feminist fantasy revision, particularly traditions established by authors who interrogate the gendered violence implicit in quest narratives and chosen-one mythologies. Brown’s innovation lies in making her protagonist both victim and perpetrator, neither passively suffering nor triumphantly resisting, but instead negotiating survival within and eventual reproduction of violent systems. This represents a more sophisticated engagement with power than narratives of simple resistance or victimhood allow.
Brown’s identity as a Black, neurodivergent author enriches the text’s treatment of marginalization and survival. While the story does not explicitly racialize its characters, the dynamics of exploitation it depicts—extraction of resources and labor from the vulnerable, the transformation of people into commodities, the breaking apart of families, the forced education into systems of violence—resonate with histories of slavery, colonialism, and ongoing structural violence. The beggar children “scratching in the dirt for bugs and bits of roots to eat to stay alive” while villagers joke about making them into stew evokes both historical famines engineered by colonial extraction and contemporary dehumanization of the impoverished and displaced.
The story’s treatment of disability and neurodivergence emerges most clearly in its representation of magic as fundamentally embodied and often painful. The Bloodpotter’s true form—“all bones and stretched skin,” covered in “a flurry of nightmarish arms sprouting from everywhere”—literalizes the experience of bodies that don’t conform to normative standards. His careful construction of a more conventionally attractive human appearance, his need for rest and specific substances, and his alternation between different bodily configurations might resonate with experiences of masking, pain management, and the exhausting labor of navigating ableist environments, though Brown wisely avoids one-to-one allegory.
From a narratological perspective, Brown’s incorporation of fairy tales within the narrative deserves attention. The story-within-a-story of “The Five Noblemen” functions initially as regime propaganda, teaching resignation to the king’s war. The Bloodpotter’s alternate version—more historical, less moralized—models critical reading and revision of official narratives. This meta-textual element reflects the story’s own project of revising fantasy conventions, teaching readers to question received narratives about magic, war, and power.
Evaluation
“Garden of the Bloodpotter” succeeds admirably in its ambitious attempt to create a morally complex dark fantasy that refuses easy answers or comfortable resolutions. Brown’s greatest achievement lies in her ethical sophistication—the story refuses to condemn or excuse, instead mapping the ways violence reproduces itself through structures that offer genuine value alongside exploitation. The Bloodpotter’s healing is real, the village’s improved quality of life is real, and the extraction that enables both is equally real. This complexity elevates the story above simple anti-war allegory.
The narrative’s visceral imagery represents another significant strength. Brown demonstrates remarkable skill in making magical transformation both beautiful and horrific, often simultaneously. The description of the HighSoldier’s creation—“sparks of light danced across the surface as the gummy clumps began to smoothen out and ooze together”—captures the terrible wonder of necromancy while the detail of “a flurry of nightmarish arms sprouting from everywhere, ending in black-tipped claws” during the resurrection ritual grounds magic in bodily transformation that feels genuinely alien and disturbing.
The story’s treatment of love deserves particular recognition for its refusal of redemptive narratives. Neither Omen’s love for the Bloodpotter nor his love for the HighSoldier redeems the violence each commits. Instead, Brown presents love as one force among many—powerful but not transcendent, capable of motivating both care and cruelty. The Bloodpotter’s love for the HighSoldier drives him to create gardens from murdered innocents; Omen’s love for the Bloodpotter drives her complicity in exploiting her community. This unsentimental treatment of affect represents sophisticated engagement with the limitations of love as ethical foundation.
However, the novelette form occasionally constrains Brown’s ambitious scope. The village’s rapid transformation from fearful suspicion to complete embrace of the Bloodpotter occurs largely off-page, condensed into summary: “Soon the woven walls were up, reinforced with mud painted in the same swirling designs of the rugs.” Similarly, Omen’s decade of education passes in paragraph-long time jumps: “By the time Hen-Omen was nine years old, she had learnt to read pictures of bodies in the traveler’s anatomy books. By the time she was ten, she could read the words as well.” While this compression creates the sense of years passing, it sacrifices opportunities for deeper exploration of Omen’s evolving consciousness and the village’s gradual normalization of magical extraction.
The HighSoldier’s characterization, while thematically appropriate as discussed above, leaves some readers potentially unsatisfied. His motivations remain opaque—we understand that each resurrection diminishes his personality, but we rarely access his interiority or understand what draws him repeatedly back to battle beyond magical compulsion and vague “bloodlust and violent pride.” Whether this represents a minor weakness or a deliberate choice to withhold sympathy from the warrior figure remains debatable.
The story’s ending, while thematically coherent, risks ambiguity that some readers may find frustrating rather than productive. Omen’s final determination to “grow a garden” could be read as tragic repetition of violence, pragmatic survival strategy, or subversive appropriation of her master’s tools. Brown provides insufficient textual guidance to definitively support any single reading, though this openness may itself be the point—forcing readers to confront their own ethical judgments about Omen’s choices rather than accepting authorial pronouncement.
Conclusion
“Garden of the Bloodpotter” represents significant achievement in contemporary dark fantasy, offering sophisticated engagement with themes of exploitation, complicity, and survival within violent systems. Brown’s willingness to center moral ambiguity rather than resolve it distinguishes this work from conventional fantasy narratives that rely on clear ethical binaries. The story’s central insight—that genuine healing and care can coexist with extraction and exploitation, that victims can become perpetrators without ceasing to be victims, that love can motivate both salvation and destruction—resonates beyond its fantasy frame to illuminate the ethical complexities of living within and perpetuating oppressive systems.
For scholars of contemporary fantasy, the story offers rich material for examining how genre fiction engages with colonial histories, economic violence, and the transmission of trauma. Its treatment of bodily autonomy, magical labor, and the economics of resurrection invites comparison with other contemporary fantasists exploring similar themes. For readers, it provides the rare pleasure of a narrative that trusts its audience to engage with ethical complexity without didactic resolution.
Brown’s work suggests exciting directions for further study, particularly regarding how contemporary fantasy authors from marginalized backgrounds are revising genre conventions to center experiences and epistemologies traditionally excluded from fantasy worlds. Future scholarship might productively examine “Garden of the Bloodpotter” alongside other recent works that similarly interrogate the colonial and extractive logics often naturalized in fantasy worldbuilding.
The story’s enduring relevance lies in its unflinching examination of how violence reproduces itself—not through simple cruelty but through systems that offer genuine benefits while extracting terrible costs, that provide real care while demanding complicity, that create love alongside exploitation. In an era of ongoing debates about complicity, reparations, and the possibility of ethical consumption under capitalism, Brown’s dark fantasy offers no solutions but instead maps the terrain of moral compromise with uncommon honesty and literary skill. This is fantasy that refuses comfort, and in that refusal, achieves its greatest power.