Anne Mai Yee Jansen is a literature and ethnic studies professor and a lifelong story lover. She exists on a steady diet of books, hot chocolate, and dragon boating. After spending over a decade in the Midwest and the Appalachians, she returned to the sun and sandstone of California’s central coast where she currently resides with her partner, offspring, and feline companions. Find her on Instagram @dreaminginstories
I love a good witch tale, but I’ve gotta admit the witches I’m used to reading about are typically of the Hollywood variety. Pointy hats, broomsticks, black cats, and twitch-your-nose magic. I grew up watching reruns of Bewitched, was excited when Sabrina the Teenage Witch came out, and loved films like Practical Magic and Hocus Pocus. But the witches in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel The Bewitching are something else entirely.
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Bewitching weaves together three storylines, each one centering on a different character being hunted by a mysterious evil. The primary storyline belongs to Minerva Contreras, a Mexican grad student studying a little-known female horror writer at a prestigious New England university. Minerva’s great-grandmother, whom she refers to as Nana Alba, is a young woman living in rural Mexico in the chapters set in 1908. Tragedy has struck Alba’s family, but now something more sinister is preying upon them and it’s up to Alba to figure out how to destroy it. A third plotline belonging to the horror writer Minerva is studying, Beatrice Tremblay, enters shortly after the book really gets going and introduces mysterious events that happened at Minvera’s university back in 1934. That winter, one of Beatrice’s friends (a student named Virginia “Ginny” Somerset) goes missing and the mystery of her disappearance is never solved.
Similar elements appear in each time period so that whatever’s happening to the women is clearly related: floating green lights, mysterious (and creepy AF) cries in the night, the overwhelming sense of being watched, and more. Moreno-Garcia is in fine form as a horror writer once again as the novel unfolds, the various plotlines increasing in suspense alongside one another so that as the mysteries reach their climaxes they’re doing so in tandem. It’s incredibly effective in this atmospheric book. It’s also super unnerving.
In part, that eeriness is achieved by Moreno-Garcia bringing Mexican witch lore into conversation with the New England witches that are so pervasive in Western pop culture. Moreno-Garcia shares in her notes that the Mexican witches she grew up hearing about were violent and terrifying. The collision of witch folklores here results in a mesmerizing novel. Not only is this book a can’t-stop kind of read, it’s also a delightfully chilling tale of witchery. It definitely had me pulling the curtains closed after dark–I love it when a story spills out of its book like that.
In addition to weaving together disparate visions of witches, The Bewitching is among those books – like Weyward and The Once and Future Witches, to name just two – that use witches as a literary point of entry into feminism. I’ve written about the connections between literary witches and feminism before, and those links are strong in this novel. As Alba, Ginny, and Minerva contend with the evils that pursue them, the people in their lives interpret their conviction as mental illness. As a result, Moreno-Garcia invokes larger histories of discounting women’s perspectives in a variety of ways, touching on sanatoriums, the Salem Witch Trials, and both Mexican and U.S. American patriarchy. The novel raises questions around sexism and underscores the strength required to believe in your knowledge and power even (or perhaps especially) when nobody else does.
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The novel’s critical commentary isn’t focused solely on feminism. It also extends to power. This includes the relationship between power and social class, as well as colonial perspectives that dismiss non-Western ontologies as “irrational” or “superstitious.” It’s a whip-smart book that uses witches as a means of subtly interrogating intersecting social, cultural, and political dynamics.
For readers who may be less interested in social issues, you’ll be happy to know that The Bewitching is just plain good storytelling. The characters are complex and believable. Sometimes alternating narration feels gimmicky, but here it’s integral to the book and comes together in really satisfying ways. Not only that, but each of the interwoven storylines has its own distinct mystery. I loved how the women’s stories were woven together; the characters and their stories breach the confines of their chapters in really interesting ways as the book progresses.
This is a spellbinding book by a skilled writer. The result is a read that’ll have you in its thrall from start to finish. The Bewitching is a resounding affirmation of Moreno-Garcia’s talents as a horror writer and offers an inventive merging of witch lore from two different North American traditions.
English (US) · 