CBR Bingo: ‘B’
Horror isn’t my usual genre, but it’s October, and I really enjoyed one of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s previous novels (Mexican Gothic), so I figured I would give her latest release, The Bewitching, a try.
This is a novel about witches, told over three timelines. Minerva, in 1998, is a Mexican grad student studying horror literature in New England. Her thesis is on her favourite author, Beatrice “Betty” Tremblay, who attended the same college in the 1930s. Minerva gains access to papers via a friend of Betty’s. Betty’s timeline is focused on the mysterious disappearance of her roommate during her time at the college, and whose story she based her novel on. Alba is Minerva’s great-grandmother, and in her timeline, set in 1908 in rural Mexico, she also experiences the sudden disappearance of a loved one, accompanied by supernatural signs.
I really like the author’s writing – she does a good job of establishing a good atmosphere and a sense of slowly-creeping dread. However, I feel like this one felt a bit flat in the execution. Minerva’s story was (mostly) great, Betty’s was entertaining, but Alba’s was just weird (not in a good way). People were killed off left and right, and I didn’t really care. It also felt like Alba didn’t really care, and I could never quite connect with her character and her motivations. The “bad guy” in each timeline was painfully easy to recognize very early on, and most of my time was spent being annoyed at the characters for taking too long to suspect the right people.
I probably wouldn’t recommend this one. It wasn’t that bad, but there were definitely better ways I could have spent my time. However, I’m not swearing off Morena-Garcia’s books entirely, I still enjoy her writing style and would be open to reading something with a better plot and more compelling characters.