A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A group of pregnant teenagers at a home for unwed mothers in 1970 learn witchcraft. Sounds pretty awesome, right?

The home is miserable and emotionally abusive. They're slut-shamed constantly, made to work like Cinderella, and banned from doing anything entertaining. There's a ton of horrific medical abuse. The girls are all given fake names and banned from telling each other their real names or anything about their real life. They all - every one of them - obey this absolutely, with the exception of a few slips. (VERY improbable! Not a single one of them says "Screw this, when we're in private you can call me Linda.") Their babies are sold to adoptive parents. Girls who want to keep their babies are threatened with everything from homelessness to being locked up for life in an asylum until they give them up. But then one of them gets a book on witchcraft...

Based on the premise, I thought this would be about the girls banding together to get revenge on their abusers and forge better lives for themselves.

Haha nope! It's 80% pregnancy/abuse misery, 15% pregnant girls being exploited by witches, and 5% MAX pregnant girls doing anything for themselves including revenge.

I am not big on pregnancy in fiction. I did love the premise, but I assumed it would more about pregnancy being the thing that trapped the girls in a bad situation, and less about the physical details of pregnancy. It is EXTREMELY about the physical details of pregnancy. It has the most graphic birth scene I have ever read, and that includes in literal guides to childbirth.

I was really surprised by how little witchcraft there is. It doesn't even get introduced until about a quarter of the way in, when one of the girls gets a book on witchcraft from a librarian who is also a witch. Then there's a ton of time before they actually try a spell. Then, after they do a very successful spell - that they even use a blinded study on to make sure it's not a coincidence - all but one of the girls lose all interest in witchcraft and there's no more spells for ages. I think there's only three spells done in the entire (long) book.

Given the emphasis on how incredibly bored the girls are and how much they hate the people running the home, AND that the one spell they master is a very versatile one (Turnabout - give something you're experiencing to another person), this seems less in-character and more like Hendrix really didn't want to write the witchcraft, much as an erotica author might think, "Oh God, not another sex scene."

The afterword mentions that the first two drafts of the book did not have witches. That explains a lot. The book is mostly an expose on the horrific injustices done to pregnant teenagers pre-Roe (very earnest - Hendrix got the idea because this happened to two women in his family - but bordering on misery porn as a reading experience), plus tacked-on witches.

The witches/witchcraft elements are very inconsistent, as if Hendrix didn't know exactly what he wanted to do with them. The book on witchcraft has the kind of sisterhood and female empowerment rhetoric that was what I expected Witchcraft for Wayward Girls to be about, but the librarian-led coven (which wrote the witchcraft book) is a rag-tag group of basically homeless women who mostly seem pathetic and whose only interest in the pregnant girls is using the most powerful one for their own selfish ends.

Sometimes witchcraft seems very powerful, sometimes it seems useless. The pregnant girls are mostly not interested in using it, and have no imagination in terms of what they might be able to use it for. At one point they have spells they could use to turn invisible, fly, etc, and they don't even bother to try them because there's no spell that fits a very specific goal they have -- without even considering trying out the magic they do have as part of an overall plan to accomplish their goal! They keep saying it's pointless to do magic because it can't get them money and a home, but some of the spells actually could do that, if they were willing to say invisibly rob a bank.

In general, the depiction of witchcraft is very negative. Most of what we see involves exploitation, self-mutilation, and general misery. The pregnant girls are miserable, but the witches are also miserable. The Magical Negro cook who helps out the white girls (the one black girl renounces witchcraft very early on) uses magic to fight the witches, but doesn't consider herself a witch and thinks magic is evil (I guess except the magic she uses? very inconsistent!)

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The overall attitude to witchcraft is both inconsistent and annoying. The end implies that it's a metaphor for female empowerment, but nothing in the rest of the book supports that. Most of the time, the witches are evil or pathetic or both. When the protagonist finally has her baby, she thinks that bringing life into the world is the REAL magic that puts witchcraft to shame BARF FOREVER.

If you want a book where teenage girls get revenge and the upper hand, 99% of the book is not that. Also, the word "pregnant" is used about 5000 times, or maybe it just felt that way.

I generally like Grady Hendrix on women's issues, but WOW was this one a miss.

Content notes: Told not shown child sexual abuse. Upsetting depictions of medical abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, slut-shaming, self-mutilation, and forcibly separating mothers from babies. THREE extremely graphic and horrifying birthing scenes. An absolutely classic Magical Negro. Pervasive and graphic pregnancy details.

In the world of this book, slasher movie franchises are based on actual, real-world incidents. The sole female survivors of bizarre mass murders get movies made about them, and attend a special "final girls" support group. Hendrix uses very thinly veiled versions of our-world slasher franchises, so Texas Chainsaw Massacre becomes Panhandle Meathook (my favorite variant), Scream becomes Stab, Freddy Kreuger becomes the Dream King, and so forth.

The women have been in the support group for fifteen years, but it's beginning to break up when one of them is murdered. The narrator, Lynnette Tarkington (survivor of two Christmas-themed massacres), is convinced that a killer is stalking them all.

I regret to say that despite an excellent action climax, this book was a disappointment and my least-favorite book by Hendrix.

(My ranking of his books, now that I've read them all:

Tied for # 1 - I loved all three but they're so different and have such different goals that I can't rank them against each other: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, Paperbacks from Hell.

4. My Best Friend's Exorcism.

5. Horrorstor.

6. The Final Girl Support Group.)

Lynnette is basically paranoia and hypervigilance made into a character. Her narration is extremely repetitive and one-note. The rest of the women are barely sketched in and don't get much development. The support group is disintegrating and the women are all on the outs when the book starts, so we don't really see what their relationships were like when they were better.

To add to the frustration, we don't learn enough about the other survivors and what they survived to be able to see what's the same and what's a departure from the movies in our world. If you're going to be meta, go all-out and let us see whether or not the equivalent of Sydney from Scream is actually anything like Sydney, and if she too ended up stalked on the set of the movie that was made out of her life.

The meta aspect of slasher movies being based on real massacres was intriguing, but makes the point of the book very muddy. In our world slasher fans are not actually relishing the suffering of real people. They're fans of fiction. Norman Bates was loosely based on a real serial killer, but Marion Crane was not a real woman. In the world of Final Girls, she would have been a real woman who had been repeatedly stabbed and left for dead but survived, and Psycho would have come out just a few years after that happened. The tastefulness and social impact of movies like Scream may be debatable, but Sydney is not a real person whose real friends actually died.

The closest equivalent to the Final Girls slasher movies would be true crime, but that functions in a different way because it is in fact real. So the points made about sexism and so forth are in this weird limbo land where they're true in and of themselves, but they're directed at a target that doesn't actually exist in our world, and in our world is either more benign or a different thing entirely. For me it made a very potent metaphor - the final girl - no longer work as a metaphor.

Even more egregiously, we barely see the Final Girl support group! It's only in a few scenes, and there isn't a single scene with all six of the final girls together. Most of the book is Lynnette rushing about madly, alone or with other people or occasionally with one or two of the other women from the group, making bad decisions. Every single one of Hendrix's other books gets an A for leaning into the premise, but this one is more like a C.

A horror-satire about Orsk, a haunted IKEA rip-off furniture store. ("Got a question? Just Orsk.")

After a sequence of extremely mild possible haunting events (escalator running backwards, poop on sofa, eerie texts), five employees stay overnight to get to the bottom of it, all with different motivations ranging from a plot to become breakout stars of a ghost hunter reality show to not wanting to spend yet another night home alone. Once the lights go out, things get a lot less mild.

Amy, the POV character, gets a lot of character growth, and Basil, the manager, is very likable. The others are mostly sketches, and the joke of the characters forever battling through assorted furniture sections gets repeated over and over and over.

The book is beautifully produced, with catalog entries for the furniture that get progressively warped as things get weirder, and it 100% leans into its premise. But it's a pretty slight premise, and doesn't do much more than just the premise. The characters and themes don't have the depth and richness of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Vampire Slaying, and the plot doesn't have the page-turning quality of that or My Best Friend's Exorcism.

If you like workplace satires, you'd probably like this more I did. I thought it was mostly just okay, though some moments rose above that, notably the book design and the ending.

Horrorstor

From the preface:

With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires both is and isn't what the title and cover suggest. It's often very funny, but it's also much, much darker and more serious than I expected. If you can think of a trigger warning, this book probably contains it, and it holds up a mirror to some real-life issues in ways that I found viscerally enraging. (Not at the book, at RL racism, sexism, etc.) It's a fun, funny, compelling, scary, and redemptive book, and the one which conclusively broke my reading block by making me devour it in a pair of gulps. But it's not fluff.

Five White Southern women form a book club devoted to trashy true crime, which does and doesn't prepare them for James Harris, the supernatural serial killer who insinuates himself into their lives. Patricia, the narrator and main character, is the first to be chosen and damaged by him; her fight to save herself and her children widens and pulls in some unexpected allies, as well as James Harris's own and far more powerful allies. And I'm not talking about other vampires...

The women of the club, and some other women who are not in the club but are also part of the fight, are incredibly real characters. They're flawed in ways that aren't cute quirks, but are both personal shortcomings and ways in which they actively participate in the systems of injustice that are baked into American society. White women participate in racism, Black women participate in classism, and everyone moves to protect their own families at the price of others' lives (and sometimes their own). But they're also funny and kind and heroic. Sometimes I wanted to scream at them, and by the end of the book I was cheering for them.

Taken just as a horror novel, it's a very effective and satisfying one. There are scenes which are incredibly scary, scenes which are viscerally horrifying, and plenty of dark comedy. It's hard to find a different take on vampires, but this one partakes of both satisfying old tropes and some extremely creepy new ones.

Vampires are always metaphors. They may represent the kind of raw sexual desire that drives people to throw away everything they value for a single touch, or a breaking with tradition and embrace of a different way of life, or the fear of one's own desires.

James Harris isn't that kind of vampire.

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I definitely want to read more by Hendrix.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires