Grady Hendrix

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS is Grady Hendrix's best novel so far. This is for several reasons. Sure, setting the story in a Pre-Roe and still segregated South helps with his messaging. There is just enough distance to comfortably declare that what happens is the past and things are better now. Yet, there is plenty of uncertainty today around women's rights, especially medical. This uncertainty creates a frisson of discomfort while reading.

To that, he layers on the fantastical elements of show more the story. He uses characters, one generation removed from enslavement and their strong belief system in Hoodooism, to build an atmosphere where it is difficult to separate fantasy and fiction, real and magic. Nothing of what the girls experience is implausible. If anything, you can logically explain every "otherworldly" scene in the book. But that setting, summer in the Deep South, living in an old plantation, a Mammy-like figure who is just as likely to smack you as help you but who firmly believes in magic, it all converges into a film that blurs the finest of details and makes the impossible possible.

If that weren't enough, Mr. Hendrix uses the real-life historical horrors of being unmarried and pregnant in the early seventies. While it is easy to say you understand the pressures women faced to remain "pure" and the depths to which society kept girls and women ignorant of simple biology. It is another thing entirely to see it happen over and over again, and that is just what Mr. Hendrix does.

It doesn't matter the age or the fact that the girl might have a serious boyfriend. Every girl is in that home because their family cannot bear the consequences of having an unwed pregnant daughter. It doesn't matter how a girl gets pregnant in WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS. There is no such thing as rape. Every girl got pregnant simply because they were wicked or bad or promiscuous or troubled or slutty. The levels of disgust you feel from Mr. Hendrix's words are beyond expectations.

Yet, for all those layers upon layers of the story he weaves into WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS, Mr. Hendrix's true magic lays in the mirror he holds up to the hypocrisy of a patriarchal, Christian, and righteous society. The only allies the girls have are each other and the one or two individuals they meet who do not conform to the patriarchal and Christian parts of that society. The girls face anger, disgust, condescension, fear, and a shit-ton of mansplaining almost every minute of every day, and therein lies the true horror of the story. It is not in the supernatural and scary parts of the story. It is in the fact that girls really did experience that smugness of religious "purity" and that we are one small step away from having to endure it all again.

I could go on to say how I loved how Mr. Hendrix played around with the narrator, sliding seamlessly from one point of view to another as the main character drifted into and around the action. I could say that the feelings Mr. Hendrix brings to the story are so vivid and so extreme that my stomach gets upset just thinking about certain scenes (SO. MUCH. ANGER. Deserved but still.) In the end, what makes WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS so impressive a story is that you could take away the witch stuff and it would still be a horror story. Because men have always been more vicious and crueler than any mythical beast, and they do so with smiles on their faces and benevolence in their hearts.

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS was, for me, a novel that devoured me as much as I devoured it. The story took me in and spat me out, emotionally drained and terrified. Terrified of the past and what women went through simply to give birth, let alone if you were a teen mom-to-be. Petrified of a future that sees those sentiments, the ignorance, and the lack of agency arise again. Powerful. Masterful. WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS is a must-read for all. show less

I have loved every book written so far by Grady Hendrix. I love how perfectly he captures his southern settings (no shocker, considering he grew up here) and I’m consistently impressed by how well he writes women. His protagonists are usually southern women, and none of the creepy, leering, obsessed-with-her-looks kind of characterization here. Did he grow up with five sisters or something? Because he is SPOT ON, every time. These characters feel like women I know, women I grew up show more with.

This is even more impressive in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. It’s 1970, and teenage girls who’re unwed and pregnant are sent by their ashamed families to group homes far away, to bear their children in secret before coming home to pretend nothing ever happened. (Thanks, complete lack of sex education!) Fern is one such unlucky girl, but she finds far more that summer at Wellwood House than she expected. She comes into possession of a book of witchcraft, and in a place where every hour of their day is tightly controlled, where every bite of food is strictly watched, the girls jump at the chance to claw back some semblance of control. But power is never free.

This feels like a different kind of horror than we usually get from Hendrix. It’s dark and occult, but I feel like the horror is more psychological and emotional. (Although there’s an element of physical terror/body horror that goes along with pregnancy, especially for an unprepared teenager, and how did a man capture that fear, from a woman's perspective, so well?!! Well done!!) This book is about betrayal, power, isolation, loss and grief, love, and found family. It was powerful, the ending was so perfect, and it’s a fantastic witchy horror.

Thank you NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review! show less

I don't even like slasher movies, but this is the second book that I've read in close succession that was basically a love letter to the genre, and I thought it was great fun (the other book was My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and certainly these two novels make a good double feature). Hendrix's books have been hit or miss for me, but I appreciate how he plays around with well-worn tropes and humanizes the stock characters of the horror genre. In this case, the trope is the final girl: the last show more survivor of a slasher movie who kills the baddie--but no one knows or cares what happens to her after the police arrive. In this novel, slasher-type massacres were an actual "trend" during the '80s and '90s, and all of the well-known films were based on real-life cases (you won't have to be a slasher-movie fan to recognize the references--these movies are embedded in the culture now). The survivors of these massacres, two decades older now and coping (or not) with their trauma in various ways, meet once a month in a church basement as a support group. The narrator is Lynette, who is obsessively paranoid, convinced that the Monster will return and there will be a "sequel"--and when one of the other final girls doesn't show up for group, it seems like she may be right. After being shot at in her apartment, Lynette goes on the run, which turns out to be a cinematic, plot-twisting, page-turning ride. I tore through this book in two days. I thought it was fun, clever, campy in all the right parts, and fairly feminist (if maybe a bit heavy-handed in that department). A good follow-up to The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. show less

I will read every single thing Grady Hendrix writes because he understands the 16 year old in me. He knows that, in the 80s, whenever I went to the mall I stopped at Walden's Bookstore where I always headed for the near back where the side shelves were against the wall. That's where I could find rows and rows of dark glossy paperback horror novels. I can't tell you how much money I spent on those books. The ones I loved most were about haunted houses, satanic cults, or vampires (real show more vampires, not the glittery kind).

Hendrix manages to bring the same feel of those forgotten horror stories, including all the nostalgia I can stand... and he gets it right. Every single time, he gets it right. show less