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The Witching Hour @ Your Library

What with vampires, monsters, and ghosts taking center stage, it’s really kind of amazing how much there is out there on witches! For those of a witchy bent, here’s a brew of fictional witches of all kinds. Some of them are good witches, some are bad and even evil, and some fall somewhere in-between. Got someone looking for a spellbinding reading or movie-watching experience? Here are some suggestions. Note, these are all over the map, so take care before making your recommendation.

The Witching Hour is the first book in the Mayfair Witches series. Sure, it’s long, and it has a gigantic, annoying expository chunk in the middle, but I still find the story addictive and, well, bewitching. Par for the course with Anne Rice, in the next books (Lasher and Taltos) the story gets pretty twisted. But for gothic and erotic supernatural horror, it’s a slam-dunk.

It’s impossible to write about witches without at least a mention of Shakespeare’s literary creations, as they toil and trouble, making predictions that can lead only to disaster. Just as with The Crucible, the play-that-shall-not-be-named has been made into a movie– actually, more than once. The most recent production stars Patrick Stewart (formerly known as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise) who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor and only gets better as time passes. If you really want to make required reading of this play a killer experience, there’s no better way than with a live (or filmed, anyway) performance, right at Halloween.

The ultimate American fairytale is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and from the book, and especially the movie, come some of our most memorable depictions of witches. Who can forget the evil, green skinned, hook-nosed Wicked Witch of the West, in her black dress and pointy hat? When most of us picture witches today, or go shopping for that evil witch costume (as opposed to the sexy witch costume) her face is the one that comes to mind. The recent but mostly forgettable Oz movie spectacular did kick that look up a notch, giving the wicked witch green claws and a truly hideous expression, and was probably the most memorable part of the entire film. Taking a different perspective, Gregory Maguire penned Wicked, a novel sympathetic to the Wicked Witch’s point of view and life. Wicked has a sequel, Son of a Witch, and also spun off a Broadway musical, complete with soundtrack. Seek them out and put them togethe with some of the gorgeous new editions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you’ve got a great-looking display that will attract library users of all ages.

I’ve just discovered Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan books and am really enjoying them. It’s not so much that I like Rachel, but she really shows ingenuity in getting out of some crazy scrapes, and she makes friends and allies in the oddest places. Rachel, a witch, lives in Cincinnati in an alternate world where paranormal creatures have “outed” themselves and live in a separate area of the city called The Hollows, with a legal structure parallel to the human legal system. Naturally this leaves a lot of room for chaos, much of which centers on Rachel and her supernatural business partners, who are a hoot, when they’re not being dangerously lethal. Readers who are looking for a fix after finishing the Southern Vampire Mysteries might very well enjoy Kim Harrison.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed are both great television series that had witches as either main or important secondary characters. One character arc follows Willow (one of Buffy’s two closest friends, for the uninitiated) as she grows as a witch, becomes addicted to magic, and overcomes her addiction. Season Six is the season that, while she grieves over her great love’s senseless death, she dives deeply into the black arts to seek vengeance. While not all fans of the show appreciate this season, it’s a very powerful and heart-wrenching television watching experience. Charmed follows the lives and decisions of three adult sisters who discover that they are witches and must work together to defeat evil wizards and demons. There’s no debate over whether these are good witches or bad witches, but their choices aren’t always so black and white. It’s a fun little show, but not one where you can expect chills and thrills.

The Witches of Eastwick and Practical Magic are both adaptations of literary works. The Witches of Eastwick is based on a novel of the same name by John Updike, and Practical Magic is based on a novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman.The movie of The Witches of Eastwick has a fantastic cast, with Jack Nicholson playing the devil and Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Michelle Pfeiffer playing three very bored women stuck in a small New England town, who are ready to rock and roll. Dramatic, sexy, and funny, it’s a wild ride. Completely opposite in nature, Practical Magic is the story of two sisters who are also witches, with an unfortunate family curse that leads any man they fall in love with to an untimely death. This is a gentle, magical, and well-acted movie that definitely does not fall into the category of horror, and could be watched not only during the Halloween season but at any time of year. Those who like Practical Magic might also like the novel The Weird Sisters.

There’s just something claustrophobic about small towns, whether they’re isolated in the mountains or gated communities. Once you’re in, it’s hard to escape the supernatural… or the neighbors. That’s what happens in both Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and Susie Moloney’s Thirteen. In Bohjalian’s novel, a guilt-ridden pilot moves his family into a mountain village only to find that the unfinished basement is haunted by the deceased passengers of the plane he crashed. In addition to his personal ghosts, though, there are hidden dangers to his family from members of the local community as well. In Moloney’s book, the adult daughter of a woman who has recently died returns to settle the estate, only to find herself entangled in the lives of the people living in the suburb in which she grew up– a place where there seem to have been an unusual number of “accidental” deaths, and finds her beliefs tested by the people around her. Where are the witches in an isolated area, when a stranger moves in? Why, they’re all around you.

So now let’s talk movies. The Craft is a mildly scary movie targeted at teens, with four misfit girls discovering they have supernatural powers and one of them deciding to use them for evil purposes. It has Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk, and probably would appeal to fans of Charmed. Hocus Pocus is about three witches resurrected by a teenager who spend most of their current Halloween also trying to capture children’s souls. While that sounds positively horrific, the child-chasing witches are played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker, so it’s entertaining as well. This might be a little much for younger children, but the comedy and horror balance out nicely to make this one work as a good Halloween movie for families with older children.

On to scarier stuff. These you won’t want to watch with the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. The Blair Witch Project, is, well, the Blair Witch Project, a movie that’s well-known by now. Supposedly an actual film taken by college students on a trip through the woods as they explore the legend of the Blair Witch, it’s shaky looking and the camera is unreliable as a storyteller, making it incredibly creepy. I don’t know how scary people find it today, but it had me shaking in my seat when I first saw it in the theater. The last movie, Suspiria, is about an American dancer who arrives at her new ballet school to find that it houses a coven. Suspiria is an Italian horror film by filmmaker Dario Argento, who is not well-known here but is considered a master in horror filmmaking. It is extremely vicious, violent, and gory, with a creepy soundtrack, unsettling atmosphere, bizarre colors influencing the set, and disturbing camerawork. In other words, if you have someone looking for an average, mainstream movie, this is not the ticket. But if you have a hardcore horror fan walk in looking for something different, this is it.

Really, there’s a witch for everyone, be it from fantasy, paranormal fiction, comedy, children’s books, non-fiction, or horror in its various permutations (and you can see from this list that there are a lot of those). Have a great time connecting readers and viewers with the right witchy title for the Halloween season, or, really, at any time of year!

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Kirsten, Reply

Witches on Trial @ your library

“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch”? That’s the first question Dorothy is asked when she arrives in Oz. Kind of a bewildering question even if you haven’t just had your house blown into a magical country by a tornado and recovered from a bang on the head. Of course, the answer to that question is decided pretty quickly, since her house has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East. But that’s the way decisions seem to be made when it comes to judging who’s a witch and who is not. Lucky Dorothy managed to gain the support of the people of Oz, but that pendulum usually seems to swing in the opposite direction. And in America, the most notorious example, although not the only one, happened in Salem, Massachusetts.

Even children know the story of the Salem Witch Trials, and if they don’t, they really should. Any community can be shaken up by mass hysteria, the source of the horrific events that took place in this quiet New England town, and with the presence of social media in our midst, it can spread faster and further than ever before. Witch hunts are certainly no longer just the province of the superstitious. For a really excellent, accessible, and gorgeously illustrated historical account of the Salem Witch Trials, I recommend seeking out Rosalyn Schanzer’s Witches! The Absolutely True Story of the Disaster in Salem. While the target audience is really older children and young adults, this is a great choice for general readers of any age. A great follow-up title is the Newbery winner The Witch of Blackbird Pond. That award is an award for excellence: don’t let the fact that it’s an award for children’s literature stop you from reading it (Kit, the protagonist, is sixteen). While it’s set in Connecticut in the early 1600’s, it does a great job of bringing home how personal and irrational these persecutions could be. It’s a memorable title you won’t be sorry you’ve read.

It’s hard to talk about Salem without bringing up Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. This is probably the first play I ever saw (my aunt was in it, in the dancing scene at the beginning). While it’s short, it surely makes an impact (it has been made into an opera, and may be the shortest opera I have ever seen). The play brings to life the Salem Witch Trials and the hysteria that accompanied them. The Crucible, written in the 1950s during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare”, is, under its surface, a rather pointed allegory about the “witch hunts” against supposed Communists that occurred during that time. Miller demonstrated exactly what I wrote about above: that incitement to mass hysteria is no longer limited to the superstitious, and any of us can become a target at any time. There’s an excellent movie adaptation of The Crucible, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, as well. It’s frequently used in American Literature classes to engage students’ interest in the play, which is generally required reading for those classes (Want to give required reading pizzazz? Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder can do that). I haven’t seen this next movie, but The Salem Witch Trials, originally a miniseries on CBS, and starring Kirstie Alley and several other notable actresses, is supposed to be a very good fictionalized version of the events of that time.

Authors have taken varied approaches to the events of the Salem Witch Trials and to witch hunts in general. One surprise is Robin Cook’s medical thriller Acceptable Risk, which involves a subplot with one of the main characters discovering she is related to a Salem witch. I don’t know that you can say that Robin Cook is actually a good writer, but he is a compelling and memorable one– books of his that I read in high school still stick with me. I constantly hear complaints from my dad that there are no good medical thrillers out there anymore, so why not take this chance to resurrect what is admittedly a rather elderly title?

More recently, Alexandra Sokoloff produced Book of Shadows, a supernatural thriller/police procedural that involves a contemporary witch living in Salem, who gets involved in helping a police detective solve the mystery of the murder of a college student that appears to have Satanic overtones. While not directly tied to the original trials, I happen to enjoy Sokoloff’s books, and many readers who normally skip over witch-themed horror may find themselves drawn in to this. And within just the past few months, the last book in Melissa de la Cruz’s trilogy Witches of East End, Winds of Salem, was released. While the image above is of the first book in the series, the second, Serpent’s Kiss, and the third, Winds of Salem, have a strong thread involving the Salem Witch Trials. With Witches of East End just coming out as a television series, including these books in a display on the Salem Witch Trials is a great way to draw readers in to a witchy world as Halloween approaches. These books are more urban fantasy than horror, but paranormal lovers will get right into them.

Witch hunts haven’t been limited to Salem and its environs, though. Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times, a non-fiction graphic novel by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton, with shocking and effective artwork by Greg Chapman, also details witch hunts in Europe, from the time of the Black Death through the Reformation and finally to the Enlightenment. With torture and burning witches alive being methods often used by witch hunters, you can imagine what the artwork must be like. The book, written by Lisa Morton and Rocky Wood, noted scholars in horror non-fiction, treats its topic respectfully and seriously, and won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award for Best Graphic Novel.

The movie Season of the Witch does not pretend to be a serious, non-fictional account of the Burning Times in Europe. It does take place in Europe, during the Middle Ages, at a time when accusations of witchcraft were very serious. Two former knights, played by Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, are assigned to escort a young woman to an abbey to face accusations of witchcraft. It’s not a great movie, but it’s entertaining, and keeps you guessing as to whether the woman the two men are escorting actually is a witch.

There are a lot of other books, movies, and other materials on witches out there, so maybe I’ll come back to the topic again, but I think this is a good collection to get those interested in Salem, witch hunts, and witchery in general, started on that TBR pile.