Book Review: The Sourdough Compendium by A.G. Slatter

The cover gives you fair warning, but the title doesn't. Sourdough sounds like the cosy fantasy aisle - bread, hearths, gentle magic. What Slatter actually delivers is a collection of dark, twisty, often morbid fairy tales where every character is moving through life with two or three contradictory motivations and the willingness to act on the wrong one. Small in scale, almost slice-of-life in their pacing, but unsettling in a way that lingers long after each story ends.

🗝️ My introduction to Slatter was through The Secret Romantic's Book of Magic, where her contribution - San't Marten's Book of Mild Melancholy - stood out as one of the strongest in a strong anthology. The Sourdough Compendium is an entirely different flavour from that one, but the same authorial fingerprint is all over it: precise, visual, slightly wicked prose that knows exactly when to pull back and let an image do the work. Her sentences are crisp and comely, and she has a real gift for landing a quiet line that reframes everything you've just read.

🪦 The Coffin-Maker's Daughter opens the compendium and immediately sets the register for what's coming. A daughter who has inherited her father's trade, a household where the dead don't quite stay where they're put, and a story that drifts from domestic detail into something genuinely chilling without ever raising its voice. It was probably my favourite of the collection, and it works as a thesis statement for the rest: these aren't action set-pieces or epic confrontations. They're small lives in strange worlds, where the supernatural is simply part of the local economy and the cruelty is largely human.

🧪 Spells for Coming Forth by Daylight was another standout. What's astonishing about it - and about most of these stories - is how much world Slatter manages to fit into a handful of pages. The protagonist, Nel, is fully realised within a few paragraphs: her dwindling resources, her altered face, her four years of fruitless searching, the precise economics of her camouflage. By the time you're a page in, you already know who she is, where she stands, and what she stands to lose. That kind of compression is rare, and it means each story feels like a complete novel that's been distilled rather than a fragment.

🍯 The compendium gathers three of Slatter's collections - The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Sourdough and Other Stories, and The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales - so what holds them together isn't a single continuous world so much as a shared register and a loose mythic geography. Lodellan and Cwen's Reach surface across stories, characters glance off each other at the edges, and there's a pleasure in spotting the recurrences without ever needing them to add up to a fixed map. The magic system follows the same logic: witches, ghosts, blood-debts, books that should not be opened, all treated as ordinary facts of life by people who have learned to work around them.

🩸 If I have a critique, it's that the relentless dark register can feel one-note in a long sitting. These stories were built to be read individually, and reading them back-to-back flattens some of their distinct shapes. They're better savoured one at a time, ideally before bed, ideally with a slight chill in the room.

✨ For readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, or Angela Carter - or anyone who comes to fairy tales for the teeth rather than the ribbon - this collection is essential. If you're looking for warmth, look elsewhere. If you want fairy tales that remember what they were before they were tidied up for children, Slatter has written exactly that.

Rating: 4/5

[ARC received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.]