THE BEWITCHING, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“The Bewitching,” Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 11th novel, weaves a story of witchcraft that dances across boundaries of genre, place and time. In the primary story line we follow Minerva, a Mexican graduate student at the fictional Stoneridge College in Massachusetts in 1998. She’s on campus for the summer, hoping to make progress on her stalled thesis about Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author who attended the same school in the 1930s. Tremblay’s sole novel, “The Vanishing,” was inspired by the mysterious real-life disappearance of her college roommate, Virginia. When Minerva discovers Tremblay’s unpublished account of Virginia’s final weeks, her enthusiasm for her work is reignited. But in the course of Minerva’s research, she uncovers frightening connections to a string of disappearances in her own time, and as strange and disturbing events start happening around her, she can’t help recalling her beloved late great-grandmother Alba’s stories: “Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.”
An episode from Alba’s youth forms the novel’s second story line: In 1908, 19-year-old Alba, the daughter of Hidalgo rancheros, is caught at an inflection point. With their father dead, Alba’s hotheaded brother Tadeo is struggling to keep the farm profitable, and the arrival of their urbane and opinionated uncle complicates both Tadeo’s ambitions and Alba’s budding romance with Valentín, a neighboring farm boy. As an escalating series of misfortunes and tragedies unfolds, Alba comes to suspect their troubles are being caused by a teyolloquani — a type of powerful witch — and the truth she discovers will have lasting repercussions for Minerva as well.
The third timeline, told in excerpts from Beatrice’s manuscript, is where the novel shines brightest. Beatrice’s reminiscences about Stoneridge and the unrequited love she carried for Virginia are lyrical and melancholy, and her voice blooms with elegance and Gothic flair: “It was a world of light. After Ginny’s disappearance I would know the shape of shadows.”
“The Bewitching” luxuriates in the world of early-20th-century New England horror writers, folk beliefs, spiritualism and the trappings of dark academia. Moreno-Garcia has a deep knowledge of, and affinity for, the history of horror and the Gothic, and she seems most comfortable working in that mode, as evidenced by the strength of Beatrice and Alba’s stories. She’s also a very visual writer, with a talent for developing atmosphere and a sharp eye for sensory detail: a room that smells of mint; the feeling of a pearl pendant against skin; a gold and green turban. (As with Moreno-Garcia’s other novels, “The Bewitching” is loaded with her signature brand of color symbolism, where green and yellow often signal danger.)
Unfortunately, the novel too often errs on the side of heavy-handedness and over-explanation. The author doesn’t seem to trust readers to retain plot details from chapter to chapter, often hammering the same bits of foreshadowing multiple times: As Minerva delves into the recent disappearance of another student, Thomas, she notes that an apotropaic mark she finds in a book “looked eerily like the sketches Virginia and Thomas had made,” and then, three pages later, notes again: “Thomas’s and Virginia’s drawings were almost identical. They had an eerie similarity to the apotropaic marks in the book.” (By my count, this similarity is noted explicitly four times in just under 60 pages.) As such, the reveals, when they come, are toothless, robbed of any suspense. The villains, whose identities are meant to be veiled until much later in the book, are obvious by roughly a third of the way through.
The scares are well conceived but often underplayed and given short shrift at the end of chapters, particularly a stomach-clenching scene in which Minerva is nearly crushed between the library’s movable stacks, which is over almost before it begins. Indeed, pacing is a problem throughout. Long discursive passages about architectural details and the minutiae of Minerva’s library research derail momentum, and too much time is spent on the backgrounds and academic interests of bit characters. The connection between the witches of Massachusetts and those of Mexico is never satisfactorily explained or explored, save for a bit of hand-waving speculation about “universal concepts,” and the implications of a queasy incest plotline go curiously unexamined.
As for Minerva herself, I reached the end of the novel without a clear sense of who she is or what motivates her. She’s guarded and antisocial to the point of being inert, and our window into her thoughts abruptly opens and closes as the plot requires. Beatrice and Alba are much more fully realized characters, and I found myself wishing either one had been the protagonist.
At its best, “The Bewitching” is a lush Gothic tale of women and witches, of dark magic and death. But the story is hamstrung by its execution, and ultimately I was left more bewildered than bewitched.
THE BEWITCHING | By Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Del Rey | 356 pp. | $29
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