“The Bewitching” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It says something about current literature trends that I found it very odd to read a book about witches where they aren’t determined women struggling against the patriarchy, but rather vindictive beings cursing people and blighting crops. It’s a strain of horror story with a lot of history in a lot of different cultures, which Moreno-Garcia is able to use to great effect.

This book alternates between two POVs. The main character is Minerva, a grad student at a small Massachusetts liberal arts college researching the life of an obscure horror writer who had attended the same college in the 1930s. The other is her great-grandmother Alba, living on a farm in rural Mexico in the early 20th century when “there were still witches.” A bit into the book Minerva gets her hands on an unpublished manuscript of the horror writer, and we get a 3rd POV: the writer’s recounting of the events surrounding the disappearance of her college roommate.

In Minerva’s time, she gets caught up in the mystery of what happened to this disappeared girl. As she does so, strange things start happening and she finds herself remembering her great-grandmother’s stories of her dealings with witches from her youth.

Alba’s chapters are those stories: her family farm encounters misfortune after misfortune after her the death of her father. Her uncle (a cultured poet who had left the farm for Mexico City) encourages them to sell, but her brother who has taken over the farm will not hear of it. And the locals, whom her uncle dismisses as ignorant peasants, are all whispering about a curse on the family and the nearby village of witches up in the mountains.

Part of what made this book so good, as I alluded to earlier, was the different folk traditions Moreno-Gracia calls upon. Most of us Americans are aware of the New England legends of witches (Salem and all). The Mexican folklore is very different; the witches there have a healthy measure of vampire mixed in.

Tense & spooky. This would be a great thing to read come October.

Content warnings: Sexual assault, incest, animal death