‘You simply live through it’
The Bewitching
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Toronto: Del Rey, 2025
$39.00 / 9780593874325
Reviewed by Sophia Wasylinko
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“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.” So begins The Bewitching, Vancouver-based author Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new spine-tingling novel.
Here we follow three women from different backgrounds and timelines. Minerva Contreras, a graduate student attending Stoneridge College, Massachusettsin 1998, struggles to make progress on her thesis. 90 years earlier in Mexico, her great-grandmother Alba Quiroga is reeling from her father’s death and welcoming the company—and attentions—of her worldly uncle Arturo Velarde.
Interspersed are excerpts of a manuscript that belonged to the subject of Minerva’s paper, the horror novelist Beatrice Tremblay who attended Stoneridge in 1934. Beatrice recounts the memories of her roommate, Virginia Somerset, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
While Minerva and Alba are connected by blood, and Minerva and Beatrice through the manuscript, all three women share another similarity: encounters with witches that led to destruction, death, and heartbreak.
The Bewitching draws on both Moreno-Garcia’s university experiences and her great-grandmother’s stories. Similar to Certain Dark Things (2016) with its inclusion of both Mexican and European vampires, it mentions Salem and New England’s take on witches. The true horrors come from the tales of Mexico’s teyolloquani or “heart eaters,” whose torment of humans and lust for their blood are a far cry from cartoonish pointy-hatted sorceresses of Halloween.
Beatrice’s character is inspired by horror author Shirley Jackson of The Haunting of Hill House and “The Lottery” fame. Horror enthusiasts will enjoy the namedropping of other New England-area contemporaries such as H.P. Lovecraft and Henry James, while ’90s music buffs will appreciate the artists and bands scattered throughout.
The Bewitching is one of my personal favourite Moreno-Garcia (Velvet Was the Night) novels and, of the ones I’ve read, the most wide-ranging in scope. There are several genuinely terrifying moments, especially as the respective timelines near their bloody conclusions and the identities of the witches come as near-complete surprises.
Alba is its most compelling protagonist. She first appears as a spoiled and dissatisfied woman, eager to leave Piedras Quebradas and craving the charms of a man like Arturo: “She shrank closer to him and turned her head. She thought she might put her lips against his ear and whisper… whisper what, she did not know.”
After disturbing occurrences befall the farm and her brother Tadeo disappears, however, Alba wonders if it’s the work of the teyolloquani. With the help of her friend Valentín, she embarks on a perilous quest to confront the figure behind her family’s misfortune. Surviving by the skin of her teeth, she passes down both her knowledge and these words of wisdom to her great-granddaughter: “You simply live through it.”
Reminiscent of Montserrat from Silver Nitrate (2023), Minerva is initially a skeptic who reluctantly accepts the existence of the supernatural. Things come full circle when she uses what she’s learned from Alba and Beatrice to hunt down the witch targeting her: “All this time she had been clinging to rationality, avoiding slipping into superstition and fear. No more.”
The Bewitching also has a ghoulish atmosphere that will delight dark academia and horror fans alike. The key motifs—the colour green, Spiritualists’ circles, birds—appear throughout the text, alerting readers to possible dangers or persons and places of note. The haunting imagery extends to Stoneridge and its surroundings, from the taxidermy at Ledge House’s former library to the proliferation of paintings at the Willows.
Unfortunately, there is a bit of a disconnect between the three stories. I enjoyed the tone of Beatrice’s timeline, written in first person point-of-view in language similar to that of Jackson’s pieces: “Some moments return to us, intact and incandescent, undimmed by the passage of time.” This same style meant that I never truly felt connected to Beatrice, who ended up being the weakest of the protagonists.
And compared to Moreno-Garcia’s other Mexican settings such as those in Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019), the descriptions of Piedras Quebrados and Los Pinos fell flat for me. While Stoneridge is the book’s main setting, I wished more attention had been given to Alba’s family’s farm and the countryside where her ordeal takes place.
Regardless, The Bewitching was one of my most anticipated reads for 2025, and it did not disappoint. Combining tales of witches from both colonial American and Indigenous Mexican traditions and featuring naïve heroines who go through fiery trials, it is a must-read for both horror and dark academia fans. If you’re brave enough, read a chapter in bed once the sun goes down while listening to Moreno-Garcia’s tie-in playlist on Spotify. Just remember to keep an eye out for suspicious orbs and an ear open for any strange, animal-like cry outside your window.
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Sophia Wasylinko graduated from VIU, where she contributed to student publications. She was also one of the founding members of GOOEY Magazine and will edit its Fall 2025 issue. Sophia works as a library page and freelance content writer for Ichigo and spends much of her free time reading and revising one of her novels. She’s also on Bookstagram. While Sophia’s relocated to be with family in the Thompson-Nicola region, she hopes to return to the place that captured her heart: Vancouver Island. [Editor’s note: Sophia previously reviewed Daniel Kalla and Matthew Hughes for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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