For me, the creepiest thing about this story was the character of the poisoner. I loved the way she described her own terrible, deranged experience of life. The growing need to do something about the horrible, crawling feeling in her skin. How she needed to kill to re-establish her own equilibrium. She was a very interesting horror villain, and the deep third person narration made it very disturbing.
Particularly interesting for me is that the protagonist's experience is similar to the way real life sociopaths work. Apparently (my shrink wife tells me), sociopaths have a hard time comprehending that other people are real, which somehow connects to a failure to understand their own limitations. Because others aren't real, they - the only real thing in the world - should be omnipotent. But, of course, they aren't. The thousand tiny frustrations and indignities, the dissonance between their perceived omnipotence and actual mortality, add up until the sociopath needs to assert his will over the unreal world and its mocking abstractions of himself in order to restore his personal balance. For "functional" sociopaths, this usually means being a dick to someone. For the really crazy ones, though, nothing but murder - the ultimate domination - will do.
I agree with Scattercat that this story was one of missed opportunities. The story really didn't build towards anything, except for a sudden embarrassment of riches in the victim department. For myself, I was expecting it to turn out that the townspeople had figured it out long ago, but that they agreed with the Poisoner that the cost was worth the benefit. Horror in the heartlessness of the community. It would have been neat.
I was particularly annoyed by the fact that the real life story of the Angel Makers of Unpronounceable and Unspellable Hungarian Town was much more compelling. In real life, the murders were masterminded by the midwife, but they were committed by many young wives who chafed at the restrictions placed on them by their older, socially conservative husbands. The situation as exacerbated by the fact that many of the husbands had left for war (WWI) shortly after marriage and that many of the wives had enjoyed themselves (and the Allied P.O.W.s imprisoned in their village, if you understand what I mean) immensely in their absence. The poisoners - led by the genuinely sociopathic midwife - killed their husbands with arsenic so they could return to their independent lifestyles. I can see a truly creepy story about the descent of these women into monstrosity, spurred on by their trusted "doctor." That, alas, was also not what this story was about.
That said, it wasn't bad. My narrative balls are in much less blue than Scattercat's and Listener's. I finished the story, shrugged and said "that was ok," and then went back to Murder at Avadon Hill. I wish The Poisoner had been better, but I was able to enjoy it for what it was.
