Fiction Reviews
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
(2025) Grady Hendrix, Nightfire, £22, hrdbk, 483pp, ISBN 978-1-035-03087-3
I have to confess I have a soft spot for Grady Hendrix. He was a Guest of Honour at Chillercon in Scarborough a few years back, and he was charming, funny and thoroughly entertaining. Therefore, I have a soft spot for his books as well, not that I have read them all, which is a future treat in store for me. At first glance his books seem to embrace a different horror “staple” which might be haunted houses, or vampires, or slasher movies, or demonic possession, or…how would you class his novel Horrorstor anyway? Consumer horror? Certainly I’ll make sure I’m not lingering inside Ikea when it is about to shut up for the night.
If that crude labelling is true, then this must be his witchcraft book. The clue is in the title. We have witchcraft and we have wayward girls. Sometimes called fast girls, loose girls, and very much pregnant girls. Teenage girls who are sent away to have their babies in secret, and then their babies are adopted and they come back to their families to try and get on with their lives as if nothing has happened, even if they will always bear the physical and emotional scars of their time away.
Thus, we are in 1970 in the company of 15-year-old Fern who has arrived at Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, with no idea what is about to happen to her. She is confused, scared and alone, but not alone for long as all the other girls there are pregnant, and very different in backgrounds and circumstances, and outlook. One girl plans to escape with her baby and join a commune, another girl thinks/hopes/prays that she is going to marry the father of her unborn child, while Holly, who is only fourteen, is mute and can’t tell them her dreams, or her nightmares.
Hendrix has already dealt with the slasher film and summer camps associated with a particular kind of slashing fiend in The Final Girls Support Group, but Wellwood House could easily stand in for camp hell as it is run by adults – some stern, some worse than stern, and unfortunately among their number are a doctor, nurse and social worker, who control all aspects of the girl’s lives from what they eat, to how they spend their waking hours which is usually spent cleaning the house or hanging around playing cars or watching TV. Fern escapes by reading books, so she loves to see the mobile library arriving, and one day she meets, Miss Parcae, another librarian, and ends up borrowing a book that will change her life, and the lives of those around her. How to be a Groovy Witch, it is called, and carries a warning that it is not for children or morons.
The title is enough to make the other girls roll their eyes. Witchcraft, pul-eeze, but that is in keeping with the first half of the book where Hendrix sets the scene and captures the 70’s feel perfectly. We get to know Fern, her fellow “inmates”, the staff, the music, the TV shows, the culture. Here, the novel is funny, sad, bittersweet, before Fern and her friends dabble in witchcraft with the help of the book, and things become darker, and more horrific: although the horror is on many different levels. It is about confinement, the loss of self, and of control over your own circumstances. It is emotional horror, of being abandoned, and not knowing what is going to happen to you. It is physical horror due to the changes your body is undergoing, which are never explained, including the actual act of childbirth which is some instances in the book are graphically awful. And it is occult horror due to the nature of some of the sacrifices that need to be made. Did Fern and friends never think that power like this comes at a cost? What started out as a bit of fun, and a sort of half-belief that it could give them some sort of control again, quickly spirals out of their control, like everything else in their lives.
Hats off to Hendrix for delivering a thought-provoking novel. We know from British experience that such homes existed, but not too many Americas knew about them. After all, the 1970s is half a century ago. Some readers might ask why is man writing about the pregnancy? A question, Hendrix asks himself at the end of the book, but he does explain that some of his own relatives were sent to “maternity homes” to have their babies. In this time when female rights are being eroded further in the United States, it is perhaps not a bad thing to show that this has always been the case. Hendrix exhibits his knack of creating believable characters, of all shades; and his ability to set a scene, whether that is in the year 1970 overall, or in Wellwood House in particular. Readers will go through a myriad of emotions reading Witchcraft for Wayward Girls where the real horror is people and the society that made them. I look forward to seeing which horror staple Hendrix will tackle next. Recommended.
Ian Hunter
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