The Bewitching "When I was a girl, there were still witches" Mexico, 1908: Alba's family is grieving the death of her father. Their farm is struggling despite what Alba's brother Tadeo wants to admit, and when strange things begin to happen, people in the area begin to believe that the family is cursed. New England, 1934: Everything is going well for Barbara Tremblay. She attends an excellent college, has a great group of friends, and is quickly falling in love with her beautiful roommate, Virginia. But when Virginia starts to see strange figures following her around and disappears, Barbara's world is turned on its head. New England, 1998: Minerva has done everything she can to gain admittance at her New England college in order to leave her homeland of Mexico and study the life and works of her favorite horror novelist, Barbara Tremblay. Though outwardly, the stories that Tremblay wrote seem very different from the tales Minverva grew up hearing from her great-grandmother, Nana Alba, she discovers that there are more links between these traditions than she ever imagined. When she begins to unravel the story of Virginia's disappearance, strange things begin happening to her, and she finds remembering her great-grandmother's tales may be the only thing that will save her. Over the years, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has developed a skill for writing the uncanny, beginning her stories with ordinary people going about their ordinary lives and finding, piece by piece, that they have wandered into something truly horrifying. The Bewitching is no exception and is her strongest work since 2020's Mexican Gothic. In both books, the uncanny elements creep in, little by little, while the protagonists either don't notice or ignore what's happening around them until the horror is too great to ignore- at which point they must rely upon their wits to survive rather than strength or force. They are beguiling stories with characters the reader can sympathize with and want to see succeed. Unlike Mexican Gothic, however, The Bewitching has multiple timelines that follow characters in 1908, 1934, and 1998. Oftimes, novels with multiple timelines fail thanks to one or another of those timelines being uninteresting, filled with flat characters, or failing to properly mesh with the other timeline/s in the book. Fortunately, Moren-Garcia knows how to quickly build sympathetic characters and compose tightly written stories, so while the 1908 and 1934 sections don't receive quite as much page-time as the 1998 story, they are compelling and essential. The reader cannot skip one timeline without losing context vital to the overarching story. The settings, too, are well-considered. At first glance, one might wonder what Mexican folk stories have to do with New England-based horror novels inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, but there comes a point when Moreno-Garcia suggests that there are strange links between these disparate tales. Because they provide a glimpse into humanity's general fears, that there is something consistent to them, regardless of where in the world they come from. Principles of physics are the same no matter where you are; drop a ball in either Tokyo or Buenos Aires, and it will fall to the ground. Human fear is similar: we fear death, and so ghosts and blood-drinking monsters show up everywhere. And so the means to fight them might be the same from one tradition to another, if only we open our ears and hearts to the stories told by the generations before us. Like Mexican Gothic, The Bewitching has a satisfying conclusion, though that's not to say that evil is defeated forever. In both books, there is a sense that the darkness could continue, could become someone else's problem in the future. But while evil might remain, there are good people everywhere, and if they remember the stories of the past, they, too, have a chance to hold back the darkness. Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the advance copy for review. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Book Review: The Bewitching
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