Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Grady Hendrix

‘We were girls... bad girls, neurotic girls, needy girls, wayward girls, selfish girls ... but for girls like us,
down there at the Home, the devil turned out to
be our only friend.’

YOU can’t use the word ‘bewitching’ too many times when extolling the delicious vices and virtues of bestselling US author Grady Hendrix’s latest
chiller-thriller... a totally unique and addictive tale of teenage pregnancy, female oppression, unexpected empowerment, and witchcraft at its wildest and
most wicked.

Best known for a string of quirky, heart-thumping novels – including My Best Friend’s Exorcism, How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, and Horrorstör, the only tale of a haunted Ikea store you’ll ever need – it’s no surprise that Hendrix (pictured below) is known as a master of the horror genre. And now he’s back to wow his adoring fans with a torrid, twisted story set in the southern states of America in the sexually repressed 1970s where a group of ‘disgraced’ girls await the birth of their babies at an authoritarian and pitiless home for unmarried mothers in Florida.   

Abandoned by their angry and embarrassed families into the cold and uncaring arms of Wellwood House’s hard-hearted spinster owner, Ethel Wellwood, and her staff of quasi-sadists, the girls are left to have their babies in secret... until they get their hands on a book about witchcraft and suddenly have a power more deadly than they could ever have imagined.

Everyone thinks of them as loose girls, girls who grew up too fast, girls from broken homes who need discipline, girls who get into trouble and who can’t say no. 

Their punishment is to be sent to Wellwood House in St Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption and, most important of all, forget any of it ever happened and return home.

Fifteen-year-old Neva from Alabama is living her worst nightmare in the sweltering summer of 1970. Pregnant to a boyfriend who lost interest in her the moment she told him she was expecting, her father was incensed by the news and told her that it would be better if she was

dead. Neva tried everything to ‘fix’ her dilemma but nothing worked so now her emotionless father is driving her to Florida which declares itself ‘The Sunshine State’ but promises only a dark unknown for the terrified teenager.

Under the stern and watchful eye of Miss Wellwood, Neva – now named Fern as each arrival is allocated a ‘flower’ name to preserve her anonymity – meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a cynical hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune, and Zinnia, a budding musician who is convinced she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And then there’s Holly, a wisp of a girl who is barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they are allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them and forbid any contact with outsiders. But then avid reader Fern meets eccentric mobile librarian Miss Parcae who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, promising that it ‘might have some answers.’ Soon, the girls are testing out spells and find that power is in their grasp for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid... and, as they discover, it’s usually paid in blood.

If there’s one message that speaks loudly and clearly in this unholy horror romp it’s that there’s power in a book... and Hendrix grabs that idea and allows it to run amok from the minute Fern opens the pages of Miss Parcae’s sinister book and finds the words ‘cut through the fog of her pregnant brain and something deep inside her body woke up.’ From this point on, this well-practised conjuror of black magic moves into overdrive as the suppressed rage and frustration of the oppressed girls – stripped of their right to have autonomy over their own bodies – is allowed to spill over into a terrible revenge.

Fielding a cast of immaculately drawn and authentic characters, Hendrix packs his plot with moral complexities, flashes of black humour, and searing home truths about the treatment of pregnant teenagers. Add on supernatural vibes aplenty, and visceral childbirth scenes that are not for the faint-hearted, and you have a wickedly brilliant, emotional and truly haunting horror classic that is entertaining, empowering and yes, utterly bewitching!
(Tor Nightfire, hardback, £22)