“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.
In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.
Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.
368 pages
Published July 15, 2025
The way similar elements in ghost stories pop up all over the world has long fascinated me. Those who come back from the dead, by whatever means, often seem bent on devouring the living in one form or another. We nearly all have stories of the spirits of the departed showing signs that they're not quite gone, even if we can't always see them. The signs we make to ward off evil, the ways that evil can manifest; there are so many overlaps that, while they can sometimes be attributed to cultures meeting and sharing their beliefs, other times just come down to people trying to understand the world they live in and figure out how it all works. Maybe there's something deep in human brains that make us pre-disposed to these folkloric overlaps, I don't know.
These overlaps don't necessarily lie at the core of The Bewitching, but they do play a part. The novel is written over 3 different periods of time. The first, Minerva's chapters, take place in the late 90s, as Minerva struggles with her thesis and tries to dig through the journal of a writer she's studying, the little-known horror author Beatrice Tremblay. In 1908, we see chapters from Minerva's great-grandmother, Nana Alba, and her dealing with a powerful witch who has targeted her family. And in the 1930s, we see entries from Beatrice Tremblay's diary, writing about the incident in her youth that inspired her novel, The Vanishing, one of Minerva's favourite novels and the story that made her really want to study horror fiction to begin with. All of these time periods are essential to understanding the story, all of which contain those overlapping elements that lead Minerva to saving her life and explaining the mystery behind The Vanishing in the first place.
The story being delivered to the reader in small pieces, spread across nearly a century of time and two different countries, is a good way to spread out the mystery of it all, especially because something relevant in one time period might not hold true for the others. As much as cultures have overlaps in their mythologies and folklore, that doesn't mean all have the same beliefs. There are enough red herrings to keep a reader turning pages, but not so many as to lead that reader entirely astray.
That said, the mystery of the witches wasn't particularly well hidden. In Alba's chapters, I ended up with 2 different suspects for the witch, each with what I thought were solid motivations for what they were doing, and once one suspect was eliminated, there was no more mystery at all. I had strong suspicions for the culprit in Beatrice's diary entries, too, which made it easy to figure out who was causing similar events to occur to Minerva herself.
But I don't read books, even books with a strong sense of mystery, to be surprised by reveals and endings. Even if I guess the Who-Dunnit aspect, I still love seeing how it all comes together, and that was entirely the case with The Bewitching. I didn't want to put it down, and I read nearly all of it in a single day!
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's writing is impeccable, filled with so much fine detail that it was easy to transport myself not only to a time I vividly remember (I was alive in the 90s, old enough to remember the styles and the music and to relate to Hideo's bootleg anime distribution), but to times and places I have no real analog for in my life. Not that I claim to understand what it was like to live in Mexico in the early 1900s, not from a single book, but I fell into the rhythm and style of writing well enough in the parts that were familiar to me to not be thrown out of that groove when I hit sections I haven't personally experienced. To bring these things to life for readers who, at most, would have experienced only 1 of the time periods in The Bewitching, is a skill deserves recognition.
This was my introduction to this author's writing, and if this is a taste of what I can expect from her other novels, then I think she'll end up as a favourite author before too long. Not necessarily the mystery aspects, but the detailed writing that's easy to get lost in, the look into aspects of a culture I know unfortunately little about, and more great stories to fill my bookshelves.
I'm determined to not spoil anything in this review, because I do think it's a novel best appreciated by diving in headfirst and appreciating the dark academia and historical aspects for oneself, rather than reading what one random person on the Internet thinks. But this random person still gives it praise, and highly recommends it, especially to horror and mystery fans who are open to a story that crosses time and cultural boundaries and strikes to the heart of what makes us shiver when the dry leaves whisper and the shadows grow long.
