The Bewitching BOOK REVIEW

• Date Published:
  2025
• Length:
  368 pages—Listening Time: 14 hours 7 minutes
• Genre:
  Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Historical Fiction
• Setting:
  Early 1900s, 1930s and 1990s; rural mountains in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico and Massachussetts
• Awards:
  Locus Award Finalist Horror Novel 2026; Bram Stoker Award Nominee Novel 2025; Sunburst Award Longlist 2026; Library Journal Best Books 2025; Astra Book Awards Nominee Best Horror Book 2026; Prix Aurora Award Finalist Novel 2026; NPR: Books We Love 2025; Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025; Los Angeles Public Library Best of the Year Fiction & Literature 2025; Publishers Weekly's Summer Reads SF/Fantasy/Horror 2025; Chicago Public Library Best of the Best: Adults Fantasy, Horror & Sci-Fi 2025; King County Library System Best Books Libros en Español 2025; LibraryThing: Top Five Books of the Year Honorable Mention 2025; Powell's Favorite Books of the Year Fiction 2025; Elle Editors' Favorite Books 2025; Book Riot Best Books of the Year Fantasy 2025; Book Riot Best Books of the Year Horror 2025; CrimeReads Best Books of the Year Notable Selection 2025; PPL Staff Picks: Best of the Year 2025
• Languages:
  English, Spanish
• Sensitive Aspects:
  Graphic violence and gore, blood and blood drinking, death, animal cruelty and animal death, incestuous themes, grooming and sexual predation, sexual content, self-harm, racism, mental illness, substance use, witchcraft and occult practices, disturbing supernatural horror
• Movie:
  There is no movie or television adaptation announced or in development for The Bewitching.
• Recommended for Book Club:
  Yes, groups that love occult and folklore will especially appreciate this book

Forget Samantha and Darrin’s suburban nose-twitching, spell-casting squabbles. Leave Elphaba and Glinda to their soaring duets and complicated friendship. The witches in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Bewitching belong to the cat-killing, blood-drinking, murderous variety. Nobody wants to sing along with this crowd. And laughing at them? That sounds like an excellent way to become somebody’s next unfortunate happy hour cocktail. These witches aren’t looking for understanding. They’re looking for something to take.

Now that we’ve established which sort of broomstick company we’re keeping, let’s talk about why you might want to venture into this darkness anyway.

There’s something deliciously unsettling about a horror story that begins with the sort of warning a beloved older relative might deliver across the kitchen table. You know the kind: a story you listened to as a child, half fascinated and half convinced the grown-ups were messing with you. Then you get older, something inexplicable happens, and suddenly you wish you’d paid closer attention.

For Minerva, a Mexican graduate student researching horror writer Beatrice Tremblay in 1998 Massachusetts, those warnings come from her late great-grandmother, Nana Alba. As Minerva investigates the disappearance that inspired Beatrice’s writing, disturbing connections emerge between her research and Alba’s stories about witchcraft in rural Mexico. The past, it seems, has no intention of staying politely shelved.

A research project that looks back at the researcher? There goes the comforting notion that books are the safest place to encounter monsters.

Moreno-Garcia weaves together three women’s experiences across early-twentieth-century Mexico, 1930s New England, and Minerva’s own increasingly threatening present. What connects them isn’t simply an interest in the supernatural. It’s the unnerving possibility that something predatory can outlast the people who first recognized it—and find fresh victims, generations later.

The novel’s witches draw on a darker folkloric tradition, rather than the charming, misunderstood enchantress familiar from so much popular entertainment. Mexican witch lore isn’t one uniform set of beliefs: regional stories carry different creatures, fears, and influences. One example is La Lechuza, the witch-owl of Mexican and Tejano folklore—a decidedly less reassuring nighttime visitor than the owl on your favorite woodland mug.

For The Bewitching, Moreno-Garcia draws on stories inspired by her own great-grandmother’s rural Mexican upbringing, where Indigenous beliefs and Christianity mingle. Particularly chilling are the teyolloquani, witches associated with drinking human blood and consuming hearts. Here, inherited stories become more than colorful family history: they may hold the knowledge someone needs to survive.

Which makes listening to your elders seem considerably less optional.

That’s the invitation here, fellow reader: not a cheerful romp through magical mishaps, but a literary mystery threaded with family warnings, vanished students, and the sensation that someone is following just a little too closely. If your favorite gothic stories make knowledge feel both irresistible and dangerous, The Bewitching deserves your attention. Just know that the menace includes harm to a cat; animal-loving readers may appreciate that warning before stepping inside.

Spoiler-Free

Minerva grew up listening to her great-grandmother Alba’s tales of witches and dangerous encounters in rural Mexico. Years later, as a graduate student in 1990s Massachusetts, she’s occupied with a different kind of haunting: the unsettling fiction of Beatrice Tremblay, the subject of her thesis. But what begins as literary research soon takes a disturbing turn.

Minerva discovers that Tremblay’s best-known novel was inspired by a real disappearance. While attending the same college decades earlier, the author became fascinated with a mysterious roommate who subsequently vanished. Drawn into the unanswered questions surrounding that disappearance, Minerva begins finding uncomfortable echoes of the stories Alba once told her. Then the danger starts to feel considerably closer than anything confined to an old manuscript.

Moving between early-twentieth-century Mexico, a women’s college during the Great Depression, and Minerva’s own research in the 1990s, The Bewitching follows three women whose lives are touched by witchcraft. As their stories intertwine, Minerva must consider whether her great-grandmother’s warnings hold the key to understanding what’s happening around her. Blending literary mystery, Mexican folklore, and horror, Silvia Moreno-Garcia turns an investigation into the past into something much more personal—and threatening.

If your idea of a good evening involves a book, a quiet house, and eventually regretting just how quiet that house is, The Bewitching has your name on it. Here’s what might make this sinister story your kind of spellbinding read.

You like your witches frightening, not adorable

No enchanted bakery. No charming little shop selling lavender soap. Moreno-Garcia reaches into darker witch folklore, where magic comes with predatory intentions. If you’ve been waiting for witches to make you nervous again, these should do nicely.

You enjoy a mystery you can dig into alongside the main character

Minerva’s research into a neglected horror writer leads her toward an old disappearance and some deeply unsettling connections. You get the pleasure of following a literary investigation—without having to write the thesis yourself. Honestly, an excellent arrangement.

You’d rather feel dread creeping closer than have something jump out every five pages

This is a slow burn, not a sprint through a haunted house. The uneasiness builds through atmosphere, discoveries, and the growing sense that separate events might belong to the same terrible pattern. If you enjoy anticipation as much as revelation, this pacing could be part of the appeal.

You love watching separate stories click into place

Three women, three time periods, and connections that become more meaningful as you read: this is a novel for anyone who enjoys mentally gathering the threads. The earlier stories confirm Minerva’s investigation, giving you reasons to pay attention beyond simply wondering what happens next.

You’re drawn to family stories that refuse to stay in the past

Remember those unsettling tales an older relative told with an entirely straight face? Minerva’s great-grandmother’s warnings take on new significance as her research progresses. That connection gives the supernatural danger a personal edge: sometimes the person you wish you could question is the person who’s no longer there.

You want folklore woven into the danger

Mexican witch lore isn’t merely decorative background here. It helps shape the threat and connects Alba’s experiences in Mexico with the later New England storylines. If you enjoy horror rooted in inherited beliefs and cultural storytelling, there’s plenty to draw you in.

You’re susceptible to a wonderfully unsettling setting

A nearly deserted college campus. Nighttime walks that suddenly seem ill-advised. Research that makes the world outside the reading room feel less safe. If atmosphere is half the pleasure of a gothic novel for you, The Bewitching gives you somewhere deliciously uncomfortable to settle in.

If The Bewitching left you craving more sinister magic, unsettling family histories, and investigations that really ought to happen with the lights on, these eight read-alikes belong on your list.

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
In the aftermath of Mexico’s War of Independence, newly married Beatriz arrives at her husband’s country estate hoping for security, only to encounter a terrifying presence that sends her seeking help from a priest with forbidden knowledge. The novel earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination, became a Locus Award finalist, and received a Goodreads Choice Award nomination. If you loved the Mexican folklore and dangerous witchcraft in The Bewitching, this blend of folk magic, religious tension, and creeping gothic dread should make you feel wonderfully—and uncomfortably—at home.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Given an unlikely opportunity to attend Yale, Alex Stern must monitor the university’s occult secret societies, but a murder draws her into an investigation involving powerful people and deeply dangerous magic. The novel won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy and placed seventh in the 2020 Locus Award voting for Best Fantasy Novel. If Minerva’s academic investigation hooked you, Alex’s journey offers another outsider navigating an elite institution where supernatural threats make the usual university politics look almost relaxing.

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
The mysterious deaths of students at an early-twentieth-century New England girls’ school echo into the present when a film crew arrives to adapt a book about the institution’s supposedly cursed history. Its intertwined timelines, literary obsessions, and women confronting a menace rooted in the past make it an especially close companion to The Bewitching, although its knowing humor gives the chills a more mischievous edge.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
A father with extraordinary supernatural abilities tries to protect his son from an occult society determined to control the boy’s future, in a sprawling story rooted in Argentina’s violent history. Originally published in Spanish as Nuestra parte de noche, the novel won the 2019 Premio Herralde de Novela and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for a translated foreign novel. If you were fascinated by the way The Bewitching lets supernatural danger reach across generations, this darker, more expansive family nightmare takes inherited horror to an altogether more brutal level.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
A young woman’s discovery of an ancient book and mysterious letters draws her into her father’s unfinished investigation of Vlad the Impaler—and the possibility that Dracula is far more than a legend. The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list, won Quill and Independent Bookseller awards, and has been translated into forty languages. If the research, manuscripts, and connections across time were your favorite parts of The Bewitching, this scholarly treasure hunt offers that same irresistible feeling that the next document might explain everything—or put its reader in danger.

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
Neurosurgeon Rowan Mayfair discovers her connection to a powerful family of witches whose generations-long relationship with an entity called Lasher has shaped their disturbing history. The novel reached number two on The New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list and spent twenty-two weeks on that list. If The Bewitching made you want more witches, more family secrets, and considerably more history to untangle, Rice’s sprawling saga delivers an immersive account of supernatural power passed down through generations.

The Changeling by Victor LaValle
After his wife’s increasingly disturbing behavior shatters their life together, rare-book dealer and new father Apollo Kagwa searches for answers in a New York City where old fairy-tale terrors lurk beneath everyday life. The novel won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel, and the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, among other honors.
If you appreciated how The Bewitching makes inherited stories feel frighteningly relevant to modern life, LaValle offers another unsettling reminder that folklore’s warnings don’t necessarily come with an expiration date.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
In 1950s Mexico, glamorous socialite Noemí Taboada travels to an isolated mansion after receiving a desperate letter from her cousin and finds a household determined to keep its disturbing secrets. The novel won the 2021 Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. If you haven’t already read it, this is a natural next stop for The Bewitching fans who want more of Moreno-Garcia’s resourceful heroines, oppressive atmosphere, and family histories that become more threatening with every discovery.

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