The Robber Bride opens on Tuesday, October 23, 1990, as Libra moves into Scorpio, as Atwood informs us. Three middle-aged Toronto women--Tony, a military historian; Charis, a flower child; and Roz, an entrepreneur--who have been friends since university, are meeting for lunch in a trendy Queen Street restaurant called The Toxique. The seemingly disparate trio are bonded by their mutual hatred and fear of a fourth classmate, the evil marauder Zenia, who has the power to bridge their defenses, steal their lovers, and even to come back from the dead and bewitch their children with her nefarious wiles.

No fairy tale, not even Grimms' version of "The Robber Bridegroom" (which Atwood has shamelessly appropriated and combined with various body parts and peccadilloes associated with contemporary Canadian sirens), has a villain more dastardly than Zenia. Neither were there ever victims with such compelling and grisly tales of childhood neglect and sexual abuse as the three friends. They are the raw stuff of encounter groups and feminist consciousness-raising. Zenia systematically befriends and betrays each of the women, metaphorically slaying one a decade, enabling Atwood to romp and rampage through the sexual and cultural history of the past 30 years.