Why The Bewitching Works

Released on July 15th, The Bewitching is the latest book from Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. If you don’t know who that is, where have you been?

It’s the story of three women battling dark entities and evil workings. A story that spans decades and miles to tie Mexican witchcraft with New England witchcraft. It’s about blood, greed, and power.

In this book, we meet Alba, a restless young woman who wants to escape her family’s farm with her dashing uncle. We also meet her great-granddaughter, Minerva, a college student suffering from burnout while working on her thesis. Finally, and my personal favorite, we meet Beatrice Tremblay, a young writer in love with her college roommate who mysteriously vanishes one cold, dark winter night.

I loved every second of it. So let’s take the story apart and talk about why The Bewitching works.

Every time I talk about Moreno-Garcia, I have to talk about her settings. When reading one of her stories, you can feel the places her characters live in. In Alba’s parts, we walk on a family-run Mexican farm, plucking chickens and sewing patches on rowdy children’s clothes. When we’re with Beatrice, we can feel the constrained and manicured lives of female college students during the Great Depression. Minerva’s parts feel like a campus town in the summer. All but abandoned.

We see this and feel this because each character feels these things. It’s in the small bits of internal monologue. An itchy collar on a dress. Meeting your dance date in the lobby of your dorm. The trees rustling, the sunlight turned green coming through their leaves.

It’s the smallest details, told matter-of-factly, that make this possible. The characters talk about what they’re experiencing with their senses as though we must know what that feels like. And we do.

A major theme in Moreno-Garcia’s books is romance. Love stories. In Bewitching, the theme is more about lost love. More than that, losing the opportunity for love. The almost romance that will never be. That sort of thing.

This is something I think most of us have felt. The unrequited crush. The relationship was just never timed right. Or the love that was taken from us by the tragedy of one sort or another.

This makes the pain of the characters relatable. And it’s something I don’t think we see enough of in fiction.

There are plenty of meet-cutes. (Bleh). Plenty of slow burn, will they won’t they sort of stories. Even plenty of loves taken too soon. But they got to the love part first.

Losing someone who was never really yours is a different sort of pain. It’s strange, still trying to shift through feelings that were never fully grown. Strange to explain to people why you feel how you feel. Because it’s not the loss of a life or a loved one. It’s the loss of what could have been, and now never will. This is something that is explored in heartbreaking detail in this book.

Finally, I have to talk about the witchcraft in The Bewitching. Because, just in case you didn’t know, I’m a practitioner. There’s a lit spell candle on my desk as I write this.

Much like in Silver Nitrate, another book by the same author, the witchcraft in this book makes sense. I loved the practitioners in Alba’s village, selling protections and trinkets. It feels real. I loved Ginny’s automatic writing being used to contact her mother. I loved the cryptic warnings and tarot cards. And I especially loved the explicit explanation of intent in this book. Because I can tell you from experience, intent is the most important thing in witchcraft. No spell works without it. But I have worked magic with nothing but my intent and words on a page. Candles, crystals and herbs are all well and good. Iron and bowls of blessed water are lovely. But nothing matters more than intent.

I’ve mentioned before that Sylvia Moreno-Garcia is either a practitioner or did all the right research. Either way, the witchcraft in The Bewitching gets this witch’s seal of approval.

If you haven’t read The Bewitching yet, go do it. If you have read it and loved it as much as I did, you have great taste. I recommend reading Lucy Undying by Kiersten White, Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, The Hacienda by Isabel Canas, or Quiet Apocalypse by me. Each one has a witchy or historical vibe that will certainly keep you up at night.

Now I want to hear from you. Did you read The Bewitching? If so, what did you think of it? Let us know in the comments. And if there’s a book or movie you want me to pick apart to see why it works, let me know that as well.

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Spooky season is coming, and it’s time for some creepy reads. Check out my horror novel Quiet Apocalypse, about a witch trapped in her apartment during a dark winter storm with a demon devoted to ending the world.

Or check out my horror short, The Man In The Woods. A man tries desperately to protect his granddaughter from the mysterious man in the woods. But his fear only grows when a new housing complex is built too close to the woods.