Is someone talking smack about you behind your back? Don’t fret. Do as a character suggests in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “The Bewitching”:
“It’s very easy to cast a spell to prevent people from gossiping about you … You take the tongue of a small animal and drive a nail through it into the ground. Sprinkle a smidgen of graveyard earth upon it and you’re done.”
Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy — if you’re a witch (or a warlock) and not squeamish.
Based on some of the more gruesome scenes in her latest offering, the “Mexican Gothic” and “Velvet Was the Night” author is not the least bit. A modicum of blood, a smattering of gooey shapeshifting and a dollop of melty death throes all factor in this tale of generational witchery that kicks off in 1998 Massachusetts, travels to 1908 Mexico, then back to Massachusetts in 1934 and around again.
In the 1998 chapters, Minerva is a graduate student researching the work of Beatrice Tremblay at the same college the fictitious horror writer attended in 1934. The 1934 chapters evolve from Tremblay’s papers, recounting the disappearance of a friend and classmate who talks to ghosts and creates spirit paintings.
Minerva’s great-grandmother Alba is the subject of the 1908 chapters, where she’s a headstrong teen who covets the best things in life but not the kind a farm offers, especially a farm that seemed to have attracted bad luck after her father died and her brother took over running it.
When her handsome and glamorous uncle arrives, Alba happily embraces the possibility of getting out from under the day-to-day domestic dreariness of farm life. He offers escape, but then a disappearance changes everything, forcing Alba to confront the curse that has befallen her family — and the price she will have to pay to lift it.
A disappearance unravels Minerva’s life, too. A student under her supervision as a resident assistant has left behind possessions after seemingly dropping out before summer break starts. Then strange things start to happen, echoing Alba’s experience and Beatrice’s.
