Mrs. Earline Baker arrives for her weekly reading in her Sunday best, plum nails, silver curls fresh from the beauty shop, and a palm-shaped bruise across one cheek. It is the second one in two months. Nobody mentions it. The great-aunt of the house sends the teenage reader out on an errand, then explains to Mrs. Earline, in the gentlest voice imaginable, that she grows all sorts of things in her greenhouse and is very good at solving a pest problem, should anyone ever find themselves with one. A week later the husband’s obituary is in the paper. We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells is sold as a Southern gothic thriller about two estranged sisters, and it is. It is also a four-generation ledger of women who have never once been able to call the police.
Nobody in This Family Has Ever Called the Police
The Robbins women of Puddle Creek, Tennessee, are the kind a small town calls witchy so it does not have to call them anything worse.
Aunt Ruth hangs animal bones on the fence posts as wards, and explains that they work not because they hold magic but because a town determined to hate you may as well be made to fear you. Aunt Hattie-May sells elderberry syrup, bakes for shut-ins, tells expectant mothers the sex of the baby weeks before an ultrasound, and quietly supplies certain women with certain bottles. The girls’ mother is serving time for shooting their father at the kitchen table after a decade of him putting his hands on her.
By the middle of We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells, a reader can count four separate men in this bloodline who died conveniently, and the novel has not raised its voice once about any of them. That restraint is what makes the tally land.
The Argument at the Centre of We Already Dug the Grave
It arrives in a truck stop at two in the morning, over two cups of terrible coffee, and it runs about three pages.
The older sister believes in the family curse. The rule is old and specific: a woman with the Sight who looks into the fate of the person she loves most will doom them, and the family history is thick with lost loves and early graves to prove it. She has spent a decade holding herself responsible for a death on those terms.
Her sister takes the whole thing apart. Their grandfather, who married off a teenage girl, died of a heart attack shortly after a visit to a greenhouse where foxglove happened to grow. That teenage bride’s much older husband died in a hunting accident, shot with a rifle he had handled his entire life, and was found by his wife. Their own father died with their mother holding the gun. There is no curse in that list, she says. There is a pattern of women who fight back and a family that files the paperwork under fate. Then she asks the question the novel is built around: do you really think fate would be so misogynistic as to trap us and then punish us for surviving it?
Neither sister wins. We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells will not tell you who is right, and a reading group can spend a full hour in that truck stop quite happily.
The Sister Who Was Always Protected
The second thread will be familiar to anyone with a sibling.
Milly has cast herself as protector since she was eight years old, and the role has calcified. She decides what her sister needs. She overrides her, loudly, in front of the family. And she calls her stupid twice in one conversation and means it as concern. When the younger sister finally snaps that she is not some damaged baby bird and that Milly should try seeing her as she is rather than as she was, it is the most bruising exchange in We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells, and it happens years before the plot needs it to.
Wells is unusually clear-eyed about the cost of being loved that way. Protection here is not a gift. It is a set of expectations that somebody else has to live inside, and the resentment it grows is patient.
Where We Already Dug the Grave Loses Its Grip
Some of it is less controlled than that.
- The middle circles. The narrator’s attempts to use her gift fail, repeatedly, in much the same words each time.
- Chance does too much work. The novel keeps flagging its own coincidences, which is disarming but not a solution.
- The antagonist explains himself. The climax stalls while he narrates his own scheme aloud, at length, to an audience he is holding hostage.
- The geography strains. A great deal of this book is people driving six hours, then driving six hours back.
None of it sinks the thing, but a group going in expecting a tight puzzle will be happier lowering that expectation and treating We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells as a family novel that happens to contain a body.
Questions Worth Bringing to We Already Dug the Grave
Start with the great-aunt. She kills bad men and bakes coffee cake, in that order, without apparent friction. Ask the group where they actually land on her, and whether the answer changes when the reader is asked to watch her work rather than hear about it afterwards.
The harder question is the curse. If a group accepts the younger sister’s reading, then the Sight is a family’s way of making sense of a run of violence it could not otherwise survive naming. If they accept the older sister’s, the gift is real and the price is real. Ask which reading each person prefers, and then ask why. The answers tend to say more about the reader than the book.
Third, and worth saving until everyone has finished: the last two chapters of We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells change hands. Ask what those chapters do to every act of love in the preceding four hundred pages, and whether anybody in the group saw them coming.
Groups that finish this should try This Girl’s a Killer, the author’s first novel and a nastier, funnier companion piece. How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson takes the same question somewhere brighter. The Locked Ward by Sarah Pekkanen is the tighter, faster thriller for groups who wanted more puzzle. And This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum sits with the aftermath rather than the act.
After the Last Page
There is a jump-rope rhyme in this book that two little girls chant in a Tennessee yard, about a tree with roots so deep it goes looking for something dead to feed on. They made it up to frighten each other at bedtime. It is nonsense, and it scans, and it stays with you.
That rhyme is what We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells finally leaves a group holding. Not the shovel and not the reveal, but the sound of children turning the worst thing in their family into a skipping game, because the alternative is looking at it directly. This is a novel about what daughters inherit when the law has never protected a single woman in the line, and about the specific damage done by loving someone so hard that you never let them become a person. It is not a comfortable book, and it is not trying to be.