Reviewed by Jess Burtis
At a maternity home in rural Florida, a teenage girl finds herself abandoned by her family and far from her life in Alabama. Fern is pregnant. It’s a transgression shared by the other young, unmarried girls at the Home for Unwed Mothers. There, in the sweltering summer of 1970, Neva learns that power can come in many forms — even a 95-cent book on witchcraft.
Grady Hendrix takes readers back in time in his horror novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Berkley 2025) to a year embroiled in upheaval as the Vietnam War rages on, the U.S. reels from the Manson Family murders, and the Kent State Massacre leads to nationwide strikes. It becomes a violent backdrop as Hendrix focuses on the day-to-life of Neva Craven. Her story, however, is no less horrifying:
“I still feel like I’m going to get in trouble if I say their real names. I’ve kept this secret for so long I don’t know how to tell it. But someone needs to know what happened to us down there.”
With its pink carpeting and sunny lawn, the maternity home hosts around a dozen pregnant girls. The readers go along with the girls to chores in the kitchen, evenings watching reruns of Gunsmoke on the television, and listen to the other girls discuss their astrological signs. The days become monotonous as each hour is dictated by Miss Wellwood’s schedule. Every moment is spent in reflection of their guilt and in preparation for the upcoming births. The hazy blurring of days becomes threaded with the danger of giving birth that the girls must face:
“Somehow she’d walked to the stall, tracking through the drops of blood and a sticky pinkish liquid she hadn’t noticed before. She felt like she was still asleep. She saw her hand float up in front of the stall door. Don’t do it, she thought. Get out of here.”
Despite the lurid body horror, bloody violence is not a main focus in this novel. The true terror in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls comes from the tangible deprivation of power felt by the girls at the maternity home. They undergo mandatory medical examinations, their food is heavily restricted, and they are not allowed to leave the home’s property. Even their names are taken and replaced with a new one inspired by nature, making them Miss Wellwood’s garden of girls. Neva becomes Fern, and Fern’s body is no longer hers; it belongs to the adults running the maternity home who will give her baby up for adoption after Fern has given birth.
Unlikely power eventually comes in the form of a traveling librarian, Miss Parcae, and a paperback book called How to Be a Groovy Witch. Within its pages, Fern and her friends find ways to wield power and attempt to forge their own path. Rose wants to keep her baby and run off to a farm. Zinnia wants to marry her child’s father, against her mother’s wishes. Holly wants to never return home. Magic, though, isn’t to be undertaken lightly and the girls must rely on each other as the rest of the world has shut them out:
“There were no rivers, no lakes, no ponds; it was all one great sunless sea beneath the earth’s crust. She felt Huntsville, she felt Mississippi. She stood on the surface of this nocturnal ocean and felt its echo in the smaller sunless sea inside her womb.”
Hendrix’s work is told by fictional characters and interwoven with magical spells, but the roots are grounded in reality. Though Miss Wellwood’s maternity home never existed, ones like it did, and this book throws a light onto this terrible part of history and the girls whose stories were shrouded within it. Hendrix delivers this everyday horror through a Southern Gothic narrative. It’s a story that stands unapologetically and invites readers to find the magic of taking power over their own lives.
Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is a multi-award-winning author who was born in Charleston, South Carolina. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is his ninth horror novel. His first novel to reach the New York Times Best Seller List was Horrorstör (Quirk Books 2014), which is currently being adapted to film. In addition to books, Hendrix has written for media outlets and film criticism, and he is a co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival. Hendrix currently lives in New York City.
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