The Bewitching
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4.4 • 98 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.
“In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s sure hands, every uncovered secret is fraught with intrigue and creeping horror.”—Tananarive Due, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Reformatory
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BOOK RIOT, CRIME READS, SHE READS
“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.
In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.
Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This richly layered novel by the author of Mexican Gothic and Silver Nitrate threads supernatural horror and female rage across three timelines. In Mexico in 1908, young Alba suspects dark forces may lie behind her brother’s disappearance. In 1930s Massachusetts, Beatrice channels real-life loss into horror fiction as her vanished roommate’s presence refuses to fade. And in 1998, Alba’s great-granddaughter Minerva uncovers buried truths while researching Beatrice’s work, only to awaken something far more dangerous. Silvia Moreno-Garcia blends folklore and suspense with remarkable control, building dread through atmosphere rather than jump scares. The witches are manifestations of power denied and distorted, and the villains—often men, but not always—are frighteningly plausible. Creepy, elegant, and quietly furious, The Bewitching is like a hypnotic spell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this equally spooky and sophisticated horror novel, bestseller Moreno-Garcia (The Seventh Veil of Salome) proves she's as adept playing in the tropes of dark academia as any of the other subgenres she's tried on. Grad student Minerva Contreras should be living her dream life, researching pioneering weird fiction author Beatrice Tremblay at New England's Stoneridge College, where Tremblay herself studied, and where rumor has it her most famous novel found its inspiration. In 1934, Tremblay's charismatic Spiritualist roommate, Virginia Somerset, disappeared after claiming she was being stalked by evil otherworldly creatures. As Minerva walks in Tremblay's footsteps and meets those who knew her, the events described in her journals begin to feel familiar: first they bring to mind the stories Minerva's great-grandmother, Alba, told of the terrible witchcraft that befell her in her youth, and then they seem to happen again, this time to Minerva. She will need all the wisdom of Tremblay and Alba to escape Virginia's fate. Moreno-Garcia toggles between the gothic, über-privileged world of Stoneridge and the harsh reality of life in Alba's Mexican village, keeping readers in the dark about how they connect, and then pulls the threads together in a searing finale. It's as unsettling as it is unputdownable.
