Witches are at the heart of fantasy and folk-horror. Cursed objects, particularly cursed books, are a popular item featured in horror novels and stories. Take a cursed book about witches and you have C.J. Cooke’s The Book of Witching.
A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.
Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.
Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?
When Clementine (Clem) receives a call that her daughter Erin is hospitalized and a burn victim, she immediately heads to the hospital. She learns Erin and her two friends went hiking on the remote Scottish island of Orkney, but the only survivor seems to be Erin. Her boyfriend’s corpse is discovered and her other friend is missing. When Erin finally wakens from the medically-induced coma, she doesn’t not answer to her own name. She claims to be Nyx and seemingly possesses no knowledge or concern for her dead boyfriend and missing friend.
Cooke’s novel also unfolds through a narrative roughly 330 years (at the end of the 16th Century) prior focuses on an Orkney woman named Alison Balfour is accused of being a witch and plotting murder. Cooke introduces Alison’s family, including her husband and as her children. This narrative focusing on Alison’s witch trial reveals much of the history of where Erin and her friends decided to go camping. It is a very unpleasant, hopeless and realistic depiction, Alison is labeled as a witch and there’s no real escaping that fact once she’s awaiting trial. Alison was known in her village as a healer, many people went to her with aliments and wounds. However, once she gets in the sights of the men in power, that opinion of her being helpful immediately turns. Alison’s story is based on a real person and real historical events.
Much of the novel in the current timeline takes place in the hospital where Erin is recovering from her wounds. This setting gives the novel a tight, urgent, and almost claustrophobic feel. This thick tension only…thickens when Erin’s estranged father – Clem’s ex-husband Quinn – decides he wants to be part of Erin’s life once again. Cooke does a very nice job of evoking a sense of history between Clem and Quinn through their dialogue. With Erin as the only survivor, she is at the very least a person of interest in this case. Another complication: Erin has a toddler. Why would Erin commit such acts if she has a young girl of her own?
I have remarked in previous reviews that I enjoy novels featuring parallel storylines. I find the jumping across centuries helps to add tension to each storyline. There’s also the added curiosity of how the two stories connect that drives the narrative pull of the novel. Cooke lives in Scotland and teaches at the University of Glasgow, and her intimacy of the region quite strongly in the novel’s embracing sense of place. I could see much of what Cooke’s narrative implied clearly in my mind’s eye. It all felt quite real to me.
The Book of Witching is a strong, evocative novel that scratches my folk horror itch that also plays as a murder-mystery. I read Cooke’s A Haunting in the Arctic earlier this year and with two of her books in my personal library, I’d welcome more additions. I could The Book of Witching becoming a Shudder original film, I’ve particularly enjoyed many of their original/exclusive films, especially those with a folk horror bent.
© 2024 Rob H. Bedford
Berkley | Trade Paperback
October 2024 | 384 Pages
https://carolynjesscooke.com/ |
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
