Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix: Review by Ian Mond

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix (Berkley 978-0-59354-898-1, $30.00, 496pp, hc) January 2025.

What better way to start the year than reading a novel by my favourite horror author, Grady Hendrix. If you’ve been following Hendrix’s work, you’ll know he’s been putting his unique spin on the tropes of horror fiction. He’s tackled exorcisms (My Best Friend’s Exorcism), demonic rock ’n’ roll (We Sold Our Souls), vampires (The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires) and haunted houses (How to Sell a Haunted House) – although the title of the latter is a bit of a red herring. With his latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Hendrix turns his piercing gaze to the sometimes-fraught subject of witches.

In previous reviews, I’ve highlighted Hendrix’s willingness to use horror tropes to explore issues of race, gender, and class. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is no exception. Hendrix spends the first quarter of the novel grounding his story in the harsh, conservative reality of 1970 America, dealing with the Vietnam War, student protests, the Weatherman, and the failure of Apollo 13. These events serve as background noise to the novel’s central concern: teenage pregnancy. After a series of quotes admonishing teens for getting pregnant (including one from Bill Clinton that has certainly not aged well), the book opens with a raw, impassioned plea to the reader:

That’s the important thing you have to remember. We were unsocialized girls, fast girls, loose girls, emotionally immature girls, girls who grew up too fast… We were girls. That’s what they called us in their articles and their speeches and their files: bad girls, neurotic girls, needy girls, wayward girls, selfish girls, girls with Electra complexes, girls trying to fill a void, girls who needed attention, girls with pasts, girls from broken homes, girls who needed discipline to fit in, girls in trouble, girls who couldn’t say no.

The supernatural shenanigans come later, but for Hendrix, it’s essential for the reader to appreciate what it meant to be a pregnant teenager before 1973 and the establishment of Roe v Wade, when girls were sent away to “homes” to give birth in secret, hidden from public view.

The story centres on 15-year-old Neva – although for the bulk of the novel, she is known as Fern (a means of hiding her identity, her shame). We meet Neva/Fern in the car with her furious father, who refuses to meet her eyes. They are heading toward Florida and Wellwood House, where Neva/Fern will stay for the next several months until she gives birth and hands her child over for adoption.

Hendrix is careful not to depict Wellwood as a hellscape, a place of endless punishment and torture. Yes, Doctor Vincent is condescending, cold and uncaring, while Miss Wellwood – the house’s matriarch – is judgmental, aloof, wielding a cruel tongue. But the true horror of Wellwood House lies in the girls’ sense of rejection, the suffocating loneliness, the constant badgering from the social worker, convincing them that giving up their child is the right choice, their only choice, the only way they’ll get back to an everyday life – as if giving up a child is something you can simply forget. Hendrix’s portrayal of this is so stark and so authentic there were times when I forgot I was reading a supernatural novel.

This isn’t to say that the “witchy” elements are tacked on. For Fern and her fellow residents – Rose, Zinnia, and Grace – witchcraft offers them a taste, however brief, of power and control. That it comes with significant cost is easy to ignore when the magic works, when Doctor Vincent starts to projectile vomit (because he refuses to medicate Zinnia, suffering from a severe case of morning sickness) or the horrific curse placed on Miss Wellwood because she forces Rose to give up her child – a scene that is as disgusting and visceral as Hendrix has ever written. In the end, though, Fern discovers that their newfound power and agency has a steep price, a realisation that fuels the last half of the novel as Miss Parcae, the “librarian” who handed Fern a spell book, returns to collect her payment. In portraying Miss Parcae, a self-identified witch, as the villain, Hendrix resists the stereotypes. Parcae has good reason to threaten Fern and her friends; she is facing an existential crisis that she believes only Fern can remedy – even if it means the teenager will cease to exist. The novel’s striking climax further undercuts the pernicious trope of the evil, cackling witch.

I read Hendrix because he writes the sort of horror that does more than terrify and scare; it challenges us to reflect on who we are as a society. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is an enormously entertaining novel, populated with characters you love (I was in tears toward the end of the book), but at its heart, it’s a story that argues for compassion and kindness, that puts us in the head of several teenage girls forced to give up their babies and asks us why, even today, even when places like Wellwood Home no longer exist, we still stigmatise teenage pregnancy, we still treat these young women like spoilt goods.

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This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.

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