Fiction Reviews
The Bewitching
(2025) Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Arcadia – Quercus, £20, hrdbk, 357pp, ISBN 978-1-529-44170-3
Turn the dark up to eleven, here comes Silvia Moreno-Garcia with The Bewitching, where a student researching gothic horror literature finds herself at the centre of her own spine-tingling tale.
Minerva Contreras is a stranger in a strange land: a Mexican graduate student of Literature at Stoneridge, a prestigious New England university. This is the late 1990s, a time before mobile phones, the suspense novel’s kryptonite.
Her specialist subject is horror and weird fiction, her focus the little-known author Beatrice Tremblay, a student at the selfsame institution between the wars.
Tremblay wrote a cult witchy classic, The Vanishing, based on the disappearance of a friend at Stoneridge. Minerva is professionally intrigued by the link between fact and fiction, but unable to turn up much in the way of new material to fuel her thesis.
Looking after a hall of residence to earn much-needed cash, the end of the college year finds her isolated, creatively stifled and listless.
Things change when Minerva meets Carolyn Yates, a blue-blooded contemporary and personal friend of Beatrice Tremblay, and keeper of her personal papers. These include, crucially, Beatrice's own account describing the disappearance as it happened and her own theories as to how and why.
For inscrutable reasons of her own, Carolyn takes a shine to Minerva and allows her access to her Jazz Age mansion to read the papers for herself.
This is a breakthrough for her work - and The Bewitching includes Beatrice's own account so we can read along with Minerva too. But, at the same time, her sense of anomie and oddness deepens, she begins to feel… almost haunted. Strange patterns are left on the door of her halls, she is followed in the grounds by an unseen pursuer: something is very clearly not right, even if her friends refuse to see it.
Could Minerva be earmarked for the same mysterious fate as other vanished students before her?
However, this is not Minerva's family's first time on the supernatural merry-go-round. Our protagonist has grown up on stories of ghosts, witches and vampires told by the third narrator, her great-grandmother Nana Alba.
As a young woman in turn-of-the-century rural Mexico, Alba is living in a rather similar situation – a haunted house with a dead father, a grieving mother, a missing brother and a lounge lizard uncle whose designs on Alba can only be described as a major red flag.
Fortunately, Alba is a courageous young woman who takes matters into her own hands. So is Minerva. The Bewitching is then the story of how both deal with supernatural peril in a way which Beatrice and her poor doomed friend cannot.
While reading this novel I began counting the number of gothic tropes Moreno-Garcia weaves into the story: haunted houses, of course; a New England setting; rural folk horror in Mexico; witchcraft; isolation; alienation; stories within stories; a shout-out to Lovecraft; lots of research; familial incest; spiritualism; curses; and much more besides.
I'm not saying it's the most horrible gothic horror ever to horrifically goth its way onto the shelves, but it's strongly tending in that direction. And the author is having a great deal of fun layering the elements on top of each other like a malevolent millefeuille.
And it's effective too - for all that it is an overt exercise in literary style, The Bewitching never forgets its job is to tell a tightly-plotted, tension-building chiller across three different timelines. And it certainly pulls it off.
It's no surprise then that how much you like this novel will depend on how much you like this sort of thing. Me - I Iiked this book a good deal, as I prefer my horror to be swishing rather than squirting, as it were. A worthy successor to the author’s own British Fantasy Society Award-winning Mexican Gothic.
Tim Atkinson
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