Sorcery of Thorns

Grimoires serve as a motif for The Power of Knowledge and Its Potential for Both Good and Evil. The novel’s protagonist is raised in one of the six Great Libraries built to contain these sentient spell books, and grimoires shape her initial understanding of her purpose in life. She sees herself as “their friend. Their steward. Their jailer. And if need be, their destroyer” (40). The tension inherent in this dynamic reflects knowledge’s potential for both good and evil. However, even the most formidable grimoires, which are capable of becoming monsters known as Maleficts, defy categorization as pure evil. In Chapter 32, seeing the way Harrows’s wardens mistreat the Malefict that guards the vault makes Elisabeth rethink her views on grimoires: “Perhaps it wasn’t wrong for Maleficts to want to hurt humans—the humans who had created them, imprisoned them, tormented them with salt and iron—and ultimately, consigned them to their twisted forms” (377). Rogerson also represents this tension in her description of the Chronicles of the Dead. Even though the Malefict poses a threat to the whole country, Balthasar Thorn uses its spells to preserve the country’s independence—an inherent contradiction that complicates the concept of a good-versus-evil binary.