Triple, triple toil and trouble

One of the delights that Silvia Moreno-Garcia brings with her fiction is an aversion to being pigeonholed into one genre or another. She explored horror in books like Mexican Gothic, Certain Dark Things and Silver Nitrate, science fiction in The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, noirish thrillers with Velvet Was the Night, and fantasy in Gods of Jade and Shadow.

But even those broad descriptions are barely adequate descriptions: those stories rarely adhere to strict genre boundaries, and that's what makes her latest, The Bewitching, such a delight. It's a wonderful blend of the fantastic, pulling in everything from from the types of New England horror imagined by Stephen King to Mexican folklore, academic intrigue, and more. Maybe genre isn't the best way to describe this book.

A better way might be to describe it as a story that explores greed and power, wrapped up in a speculative wrapper.

Moreno-Garcia sets her story across three periods. In 1908, we meet a young woman named Alba who lives on a remote and declining farm in Mexico. In 1934, we follow a trio of women: Carolyn, Virginia, and Beatrice, all of whom are studying at a women's college called Stoneridge, and Minerva, an introverted Mexican student at Stoneridge in 1998, who's working towards her PhD.

Some spoilers ahead.

Her subject is Beatrice Tremblay (an homage to fellow horror writer Paul Tremblay, one of several easter eggs that Moreno-Garcia mentions throughout the book), who went on to become a copywriter and minor horror writer later in life. Minerva is a horror fan turned academic at a time before academia began to take genre fiction seriously, and she's been struggling to get her studies moving in the right direction when a couple of events line up for her. One of the students in the dorm she oversees, Thomas Murphy, has abruptly vanished, seemingly overwhelmed with his studies and conflicts with his roommate, while she also encounters Noah Yates, the grandson of Carolyn.

Carolyn, as it turns out, is still around, heading up a foundation that sponsors promising students at the university. She also held onto some of Beatrice's journals and papers, including an unpublished manuscript that details the leadup to Virginia's disappearance, a moment that inspired the late author's only horror novel, The Vanishing, now the subject of Minerva's research. After some convincing, Carolyn reluctantly allows Minerva to begin looking at the papers, and as she does so, she begins to tease out the complicated relationship the three women shared: Beatrice had a thing for Virginia, while blue-blooded Carolyn wasn't a fan of Virginia's free-spirited and new-money vibes.

Beatrice's manuscript and journal reveals that Virginia had begun to experience some strange things: she heard sounds and felt someone watching her, and she begins to believe that something – or someone – is hunting her, and as she learns more, Minerva is reminded of the stories that her great-grandmother Alba recounted to her: her brother goes missing and she too begins to hear and see things, and comes to believe that something has placed a curse on her family.

Sinking further into the story, Minerva realizes that she too has begun to experience strange things, hearing people walking behind her, finding her adopted stray cat has been strangled, and other strange happenings.

As Moreno-Garcia plays out each story, each of the characters comes to the same realization: they're each being hunted. In Mexico, Alba finds herself at multiple crossroads: her urbanite uncle has returned to their small farm after her father died, and she's gripped between wanting to seek out a more modern lifestyle and adhering to the country's older folklore and ways of life. Virginia communes with spirits and uses what she hears as a sort of guide for her art, and Minerva is drawn to the art of horror.

Each are gifted in their own ways, and it seems that that their spark or talent has brought them to the attention of a malevolent entity – a witch, who seeks to tap into the power that they possess, whether it's to further their status or to build or extend their lives and what power they've amassed over the course of their lifetimes.

It feels as though witches have in the spotlight lately, from Alix E. Harrow's The Once And Future Witches to Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster to Madeline Miller's Circe, and I think that's because they provide an ideal framework to explore the intersection of femininity and power, dredging up the injustices and misconceptions that have plagued women for centuries.

I don't want to spoil the twists that come, but Moreno-Garcia puts her own spin on witches, portraying them not as misunderstood women but as powerful and skillful hunters who wear down their prey with their powers. It's a study in manipulation and greed, showing the terrifying lengths that people will take to grasp power, and how sometimes, the people we think we know aren't to be trusted.

It's a timely read in 2025 as we watch leaders across the country given immense power to reshape the country, and how we've seen their greed on full display as they scramble for more. Moreno-Garcia shows that it's a hunger that can never be sated, and that the only way to end it is to find a way to use that greed and lust against them, trapping them with the thing that they're so desperate to get their hands on. Real life rarely plays out like a story in a book, but it's a lesson that rings true to me: sometimes, the downfall of a monster comes down to their own blindness. But first, we have to recognize the nature of the danger that surrounds us and figure out how to lay the trap. Until then, the hunter will remain on the prowl, seeking out its next victim.