The Bewitching

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.” Nana Alba always began her tales this way—stories that lingered with her great-granddaughter Minerva long into adulthood. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Minerva has become a graduate student researching the history of horror literature, drawn to the eerie life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure writer of macabre fiction. As Minerva works on her thesis, she discovers that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, may have been inspired by real events. During the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva now studies and became fixated on her ethereal roommate, who later vanished without explanation.

As Minerva delves deeper into Tremblay’s manuscripts, she begins to sense a malevolent presence still haunting the campus—one disturbingly similar to the force that once shadowed Tremblay and seemed to threaten Nana Alba in her own girlhood in 1900s Mexico. Soon, Minerva fears that the darkness entwining her great-grandmother’s memories and Tremblay’s past is now encroaching on her life in 1990s Massachusetts. Academia may be demanding, but when witchcraft is involved, it might also be deadly.