Magical tale of climate catastrophe – a pure dust storm  is the new novel from the Pulitzer Prize shortlisted author Karen Russell, in The Antidote where the moving dust looks like a mountain range, or an avalanche on Black Sunday, April 1935, in the central plains of the US. Mid-afternoon, the temperature dropped; birds chattered, horizon turned black to flatten wheatfields, burying houses  and vaporising every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty- as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger. “The onrushing cloud, the darkness, and the thick, choking dirt, made this storm one of terror and the worst, while it lasted, ever known here”. This was the end of what became known as the Dust Bowl era. Amid the Great Depression, from 1931 until the rains returned and the farming practices improved, the dust left half a million people homeless; 2.5million left Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Nebraska, never to return.

The antidote of title is a young woman who has found her way to Uz – a prairie witch who can keep our memories safe- Nebraska, named after the native land of suffering job, a community close-knit but riven by poverty, shame and even murder. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers. Until the Dust Bowl storm which vaporizes memory, and wakes up empty.

Asphodel Oletsky – Dell is her to lend a hand with her persuasive powers of fabrication. Dell is the niece of Harp Olestsky, a farmer whose crops are mysteriously spared the draught, sprouting verdantly when all around is parched, he takes in Dell when her mother is murdered by the spectre known as the “Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer” for the sinister trademark token he leaves with his victims. The Antidote  where evil doings are concealed; happy memories are kept safe. She was once an inhabitant of the very real Milford Industrial Home for Unwed Mothers, where her baby boy was whisked away from her – stillborn, although her sixth sense tells her he is alive.

Cleo Allfrey moves among these Nebraskans: a Black woman, she is photographer, part of the government’s Resettlement Administration’s project documenting rural poverty during the depression -among them were Dorotea Lange, Gordon Parks and Walker Evans. Allfrey discovers her camera is taking what she calls “quantum photographs” that show the past or the future, but never the present day.

There is also a talking scarecrow and a chatty cat.

“The dust began to lift and curtain. The wind bansheed across the prairie with nothing to split its tall loony cry”. 

The Antidote by Karen Russell, Chatto & Windus £18.99/ Knopf $30, 432 pages.Ultimate vigilante story