October in North Texas is not particularly interested in helping me get into the Halloween spirit.
When you’re still experiencing temperatures in the high 80s, sometimes you have to manufacture your own spooky season. For me, that meant choosing a book with enough witches, gothic atmosphere, mysterious disappearances, and general unease to make up for the weather.
The Bewitching delivered.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s multigenerational horror story moves between 1908 Mexico, Depression-era Massachusetts, and a 1990s college campus, gradually connecting three women whose lives are touched by witchcraft. I went into it hoping for a suspenseful mystery set in an academic environment, and while the story takes its time getting where it’s going, it gave me exactly the kind of eerie, atmospheric reading experience I was looking for.
And yes, I was absolutely reading this in October while sweating through my Halloween season.
*Spoilers will be hidden and labelled so you can choose to read or skip.
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Before Reading:
Where did I hear about this book: Book Discount Email
Curiosity or Awareness: Curiosity
Would I read it if no one was talking about it? Yes
What I want from this book: A suspenseful mystery about witches in an academic setting.
Hype Meter
Goodreads: 3.8 | StoryGraph: 3.94
My Take: Pretty close. This is correctly hyped.
Judge The Bewitching By The Cover
Spooky, occult-leaning cover imagery in an eerie palette caught my eye. The thorny, blighted vines framing a glowing bird with pins in it suggest a gothic tale. The main illustrative elements and the title form a cross, so one might expect a religious element. Black nail polish on the hand could indicate that a main character has an interest in the macabre.
Color Story
Rich emerald green appears muted, as if seen at night, combined with a glowing golden yellow suggestive of moonlight and magic, creating an uneasy feeling. The dark vines framing the scene create both a border and a vignette, pushing focus to the center of the composition.
Typography Notes
Tall, compressed type framed and entangled with the border vines suggests a bit of a claustrophobic, trapped feeling.
Genre Signals
The serif type leans into historical, gothic, and horror. Combined with the spooky palette and illustrative style, it is not hard to guess that this is meant to portray the paranormal.
Hidden Details
The cover of The Bewitching does have a few elements that pull directly from the text, but are featured clearly rather than hidden. These are the bird with the pins, the circle symbols, and the dying vines.
Mood Check
Emotionally, the cover of The Bewitching suggests eerie unease–dark, moody, and disquietingly supernatural.
Beyond the Dust Jacket
The chapters are numbered in a way that tells the reader both what year (and, as such, which POV) the chapter is set in and the chapter number. A hummingbird illustration follows each.
The ebook of The Bewitching includes abundant additional content. It includes
- a book club discussion guide with discussion questions
- an author’s playlist
- I Put a Spell on You mocktail recipe by Molly Tanzer
- Learning From the Silver Screen about the influence of film
- an excerpt from another upcoming book (The Intrigue)
- an About the Author section
Did the design affect whether I bought the book?
Yes. I was attracted to the cover before reading the description, and it was a deciding factor in my decision to buy the book.
Story Snapshot
In Short
Three women across different time periods face supernatural threats as a graduate student researches a mysterious author’s connection to witchcraft and a disappeared roommate in 1990s Massachusetts.
From the Publisher
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST • 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, Elle, Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, Library Journal, 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.
Lines I Highlighted
She was dressed all in green, with a silver belt around her waist, and resembled a sprite as drawn by Arthur Rackham.
This is what I imagined when I read this description of one of the characters. While it is not a sprite per se, it is an Arthur Rackham print of a young woman dressed in green.
Characters I Followed Into Battle
Alba is Minerva’s great-grandmother. Her story takes place in a village in Mexico when she is a young girl in 1908. Coming of age, Alba grapples with competing desires for how she would like to see her own life unfold and what she truly believes. As the bewitching settles around her family, Alba must rely on herself to navigate the frightening situation and survive.
Beatrice Tremblay is a student at Stoneridge College whose roommate disappears without a trace. The mysterious disappearance plagued her for the rest of her life and influenced her writing. She was a little-known horror author who inspired Minerva’s graduate thesis research. Her experience with the bewitching is as a close observer, but she was herself unaffected.
Minerva is a graduate student at Stoneridge College researching her thesis, tying Beatrice Tremblay’s novel to the disappearance of her college roommate and witchcraft in New England. The more she learns, the more she comes to understand that the time of witches is not wholly in the past, as the stories of her great-grandmother might suggest.
Lines I Highlighted
It was the lure of history; she adored older buildings and was repelled by the new.
Writing Style Notes
Slow build toward action, plenty of time to get to know the characters…maybe a little too much time, as it lags a bit in places.
Beautifully captures gothic atmosphere and sets scenes that build suspense in a believable way.
Symbols and colors are used effectively to drop hints and to build characters and settings in a way that taps into the collective unconscious.
The 1998 college campus is captured in a delightful time capsule through socio-cultural references to experiences and media that make this a special read for Gen Xers and elder Millenials.
Lines I Highlighted
This was what got her pulse racing, not lovers or romance–it was the thrill of research, of odd questions and murky answers.
Themes Living Rent-Free In My Head
- Knowledge is passed through generations through storytelling.
- Power and knowledge can be used for good or evil.
- Classism in academia.
- How many stories are simply lost because no one looks for them?
- The unknown and unresolved haunts us.
Lines I Highlighted
The reason she’d shown up was because she had a feeling she ought to, the thought embedded in her mind almost like a thorn. Nana Alba used to call these fellings portents and said they should be heeded.
What Landed For Me
What Worked:
- Three timelines with clearly distinct stories were expertly woven together
- Eeriness and disquiet pervade the pages, excellent tension
- 1998 timeline stuffed with nostalgic tidbits
What Didn’t Fully Click:
- The pacing was a bit slow
- The antagonists were somewhat easy to predict
Overall:
Bewitching…entrancing…and fun!
Lines I Highlighted
The romance of it. It’s as if you’re conducting a secret, passionate love affair. You know every detail about someone, their every word and thought. When you look at their writing, you swoon over a sentence fragment or a turn of phrase. It’s as if through the mists of time, someone reaches out and touches your hand.
Intentional Reading Reflection
I read The Bewitching between reading challenge prompts with the intention of squeezing in something that was a bit spooky. It’s October, and here in North Texas we are still experiencing weather in the high 80s most days, so a little extra help getting in the Halloween spirit seemed to be in order. I had several options, but felt like The Bewitching was the best fit for my mood.
As a close reader, I was able to guess who was doing the bewitching and why fairly early in the story, but I still felt compelled to read through it to make sure that I was right and to see how the author resolved the mystery.
I liked The Bewitching, though at times it moved a little slowly and I found myself getting distracted.
It left me thinking about generational inheritance. This could be inherited knowledge, money, heirlooms, or trauma. It’s left to us then, to interpret what is useful and what we should cast off. What have I passed to my own children, and what use will it be to them as they navigate this world? Heavy life stuff.
Lines I Highlighted
No man may escape the limits of his nature.
Cover Promise Rating
Did the cover make promises the story actually kept?
Yes, The Bewitching cover matched the bewitching, spooky story within.
Lines I Highlighted
A mystery is the most seductive of poisons; it intoxicates the soul.
Final Verdict
Read if you like:
- Multiple timelines
- Dark Academia
- Gothic Settings
- Slow-build spooky stories with mild horror
- Witches with ill intent
Skip if you dislike:
- Slow pacing
- Occultism
- Semi-obvious villains
Lines I Highlighted
The stories contradicted one another as all good oral narratives must.
Reading Debris
The author’s soundtrack is fun and nostalgic.
Moreno-Garcia named some professors at the college after horror writers: Stephen Graham Jones (Philosophy) and Nicholas Mamatas (Classics)
The Bewitching includes many references to authors, books, films, and music. Here are a few I highlighted:
- Danse Macabre by Stephen King
- Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol Clover
- New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural by Faye Ringel
- (three collections) by Amparo Davila
- The Superstitions of Witchcraft, Old Paths and Legends of New England
- The Wonders of the Invisible World
- The History of Witchcraft and Demonology
- Bell, Book, and Candle: Witchcraft in the New World
- A History of Witchcraft Lore
- The Witchcraft Delusion of 1692
- The Witch-Cult in Western Massachusetts
- The Turn of the Screw
- The Necronomicon
Your Turn
What appeals to you (or repels you) about spooky stories?
May your life be as full as your bookshelf and as long as your TBR list.
Happy Reading!
"I often think that night is more alive and more richly colored than the day." – Vincent Van Gogh
“Nocturnal Musings” lined, 120-page, hardcover or paperback journal.
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