THE ANTIDOTE opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing --- not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. Karen Russell’s novel follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for people's memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

In "Bog Girl," a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl who he's extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In "The Prospectors," two opportunistic young women fleeing the Great Depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. And in the title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant's safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these and five other stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void --- yet within it, Karen Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life.

Already heaped with accolades, Karen Russell is a gifted writer who likely will get plenty more for her eerie fantasy about a sleeplessness epidemic. The dystopian riffs are sharp and imaginative, but what sets the novella apart are its poignant intimations of moral doubt and personal loss: more Hamlet than Hunger Games.

A dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s lower torso. Two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood. And this only scratches the surface of what appears in Karen Russell’s new collection of stories.