Silvia Moreno-Garcia's New Gothic Novel Is Bewitched, Bothered, and Emboldened

카지노싸이트: First question: What does it mean to be bewitched? 

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: In Mexico, “bewitched” would translate to embrujado. It's different than in English, which reminds you of the TV show where the witch would wiggle her nose and she could do magic. Maybe it makes you think of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, but to be bewitched is really bad news. In Mexican folklore, it's bad news. 

The book hearkens back to some of those ideas of witches and witchcraft as something that can be quite dark and nefarious, not as something that's fun and cute, like in Halloween or female superpower, find-your-own-goddess sort of situations. 

GR: How did you get the idea for The Bewitching?

SMG: I wanted to do something that had to do with witches in Mexico, and I also wanted to do something with witches in New England. So I decided to merge both of the ideas together. I think they spoke well to each other after thinking about it. There are differences in the way the lore is in Europe and in America and then in Mexico, but I found enough commonality that I thought I could tell a story.

GR: You mentioned that the book takes place in a couple of different locations, and then you’re telling the story in three different time periods. How did you arrive at the years that you chose? 

SMG: To be frank, 1998 is when I was a college student. I went to study abroad, and I was living in Massachusetts at the time. That was an easy one, because I could remember what it was like. And it's been long enough that it now feels kind of vintage. 

My great-grandmother was alive in 1908, and some of the stories that she told me would have taken place in early 20th-century Mexico. The 1930s was this interesting bridge point that I wanted to use. I wanted to have something in the middle. Originally, I was thinking of Shirley Jackson, and I was going to do something that was set a little bit more in the '50s, maybe '60s. 

I landed on the 1930s because, I think, I had done the 1950s before and I wanted to try a different decade. The 1930s is the post Jazz Age, and people are in the middle of a great recession. There's a big downturn. I found that interesting. It's also the time period when magazines like Weird Tales are pretty big. Writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Catherine Lucille Moore and lots of other people are being published in these horror publications. So I thought I could tie it together like that.

GR: Was your process for this book different from the others that you tell straight through?

SMG: No. I always do an outline ahead of time. I have the whole outline of everything that's going to happen, so I knew at what point we are switching back, when we're switching to a different timeline, and then back to another timeline. It was written chronologically, so I might write a 1930s section and then do 1990s, and that worked pretty well for me. 

I was going to do another section that I didn't end up doing, which was the actual manuscript that they're talking about in The Bewitching, the novel that Beatrice Tremblay works on, The Vanishing. I was going to have that be a fourth section, so that it was like a nesting doll, like a matryoshka doll, to go from one story, top to bottom. I didn't end up including that. But if I had done that, I would have been going fictionally back into the days of Salem, like 1600-something. I didn't end up doing some of the Salem stuff that I was originally thinking about, so I might go back to that time period at some point in some other story.

GR: Did you have a favorite section?

SMG: I really like the 1930s sections because those are first-person point of view, which I don't do very often in novels. It was a chance to do that. And I was trying to do my best Shirley Jackson impression in that section.

GR: In The Bewitching you mention a lot of spells and protections that the characters use. Are these based on research and real witchcraft? Are the things that these characters do to keep themselves safe and fight witches based on history or folklore or ancient traditions?

SMG: They are based on some real folk knowledge of witchcraft. I modified some of the stuff so that it wouldn't be an exact transcription of what you might use in real life for most of the cases. Some of the stuff that appears in folk stories just doesn't work dramatically. For example, the solution that my great-grandmother said, if there is a witch in your neighborhood and she is drinking the blood of people at night, you go, you grab her in her animal form, and you beat basically the living [expletive] out of the witch. Then you would burn the animal or destroy it in that way. That sounds a little bit less dramatic or spectacular than some of the stuff that I came up with. 
There was a story I read in, I think, 2019 in a small town in Durango in Mexico, some villagers burnt an owl because they thought it was a witch. In some small towns, there are still some of those folklore ideas about witches. 

Birds are used in witchcraft, traditionally in Mexico, especially hummingbirds. They're used for love spells. You will see a hummingbird body, and it's pierced by needles, or things like that, or feathers of it are used together with other elements to create love spells. There's a problem with hummingbirds being in danger right now, because they are used a lot in some of this folk magic.

Then in England—and it got taken to America—there's this tradition of certain things being useful for warding houses. For example, certain patterns that are drawn on doors or windows that are to keep witches away or hiding certain things in the walls of houses. Shoes are one thing. There's a house where—I was there when they were remodeling it—and they found a shoe inside the house, and that was probably left behind for that reason—to keep away evil spirits. Bones of certain animals have been found in Ireland in certain houses, like cats or horses, things like that, that we think were used as guardians. Some of that stuff is true in the sense of the folklore that was used. Some of the specifics of the spells that I use have been changed. If you are thinking to use it as a pattern for doing spells, it's not going to work. 

GR: OK, good to know.

SMG: It's not a cookbook in that sense. 

GR: Then the particular witch you use in The Bewitching, the teyolloquani, the witch that sucks blood. Why choose that manifestation of the witch?

SMG: When Spaniards came in contact with native populations in Mexico, the ones they encountered had this wide range of magic practitioners, and some of them had a specific role or specific kind of magic that they did. The Spanish kind of translated all of it into one word, which is sorcerer or witch group or bruja. 

The Aztecs have specialized roles, and this specific kind of witch, the meaning of that in nahuatl is someone who eats hearts or heart eater. I use this one term, which, like I said, translates into “heart eater” to name my witch, but there are many kinds of varieties of witches in ancient Aztec lore and in modern cultures. 

Later on, as the years go by, and you get the conquest of Mexico, and you get this mixture of cultures, of Europeans coming to Mexico, and some stories about magic practitioners that come from the native populations, they mix and you find this kind of witch that emerges—the one that we think about nowadays is somebody who sits around a cauldron, right? Maybe there's a cat next to them, and they're brewing something. That's probably the image that you have of witches in the United States.
The image of witches in Mexico, traditionally, they are shape-shifters. They can transform into animal shapes. Bird shapes are not uncommon. Many witches transform into turkeys, which sounds kind of funny. Some of them leave body parts behind. You will hear stories about people when they transform into the turkey, they leave their legs behind, for example. 

The idea of transformation is very often there, which is being able to transform into animal shapes, and the idea of blood drinking is also very much there. Then the third idea that always emerges is how dangerous these creatures are. They are a true and present danger in traditional folklore. In some small communities, there's always this idea of witches are real. 

One common thing of witches, whether they transform or not, is that they are generally associated with blood drinking. Most witches in Mexican folklore, they commit evil. They do bad things, like they damage your crops, or they sicken people, or they make animals die. But they also, very often, drink blood, especially the blood of children. 

GR: How did you do your research for this book? 

SMG: A lot of it was from stories that my great-grandmother told me about witches. That's where this whole idea originally came from—my great-grandmother told me a story about how her uncle went missing and he was taken away by witches. That was one of the originating stories. 

She also told other stories about witches and what they did and how dangerous they were, how to defend yourself from witches, that sort of stuff. 

Then I went and I looked at some of the folk studies that have been done around witches in different parts of Mexico. I was comparing the knowledge that I had, my own personal family knowledge, to folk tales that I know and seeing how they mapped out. They map out really well—my great-grandmother could have been a folklorist. 

Then I looked at the American stories. I read documents of witch trials in Salem, what did people say when they go before a judge, both when they're accusing and when they're the accused? What did they say in England versus in the United States, when you've got witch trials and people talking about that sort of stuff. I looked at that knowledge.

GR: You mentioned your great-grandmother. When I was reading this, I wondered if your characters were based on real people? You also mention other people who go missing in the novel. Were those stories that you came across when you were doing your research? 

SMG: I find stories with people that go missing interesting because I think they are more disturbing than when you actually see a crime that has been committed and you know what happened. I remember as a child reading a book about famous missing people and being fascinated—things like Roanoke, the missing colony in the United States, the Mary Celeste, where they found a boat and there was nobody on it. I've always found that kind of situation interesting, so I went back to that. 

There are names of lots of people that I know peppered in the book. Friends of mine, people that might recognize themselves if they read it. I do that sometimes in my books. It's funny when I do, and one of my friends reads it, and then they phone and they say, “I'm in your book!” 

Some of the people that are popping up as fictional characters in the book are horror writers, and people might actually recognize them. Or I'm stealing their last name, like Beatrice Tremblay, I'm stealing the name from somebody who's a well-known author, but I don’t think they’ll mind.

GR: Then I was wondering what’s your writing and revision process? How long did it take to finish this novel?

SMG: I usually write a novel a year. In this case I had the advantage of knowing the 1990s period very well. That was a big thing. I had a really good idea of the 1908 period, so it was the 1930s that took a bit more research. I was just reading a lot about witch trials and things like that. It can get a little bit repetitive, if you're reading witch trials, once you get to the eighth witch trial and you're like, “OK, I get it” kind of situation. I did read a lot of those, and books published in and around the 1600s and 1700s where people are having theological and philosophical discussions about witches. Are these real? Are they not? Do they emanate from the devil or not? Those kinds of things. It's very dense language—we're reading something that's written in the times of the American pilgrims. 

GR: When you’re writing, do you know the ending or do you see where the story takes you? Do you ever change your outline and what ultimately happens?

SMG: I did think about doing something slightly different, but no, in the end, once I had an outline done, it was all mapped out. 

At one point, I had a whole other 20,000 to 30,000 words in there that I was going to write, which was the actual story of The Vanishing that you would see bits of the pieces from the novel, and that got taken out. I liked the idea, but it felt disconnected. That was early on, before the outline was completely firm and locked. 

GR: What's the most fun part for you writing a book like this? 

SMG: I love the research. I love finding out about all kinds of weird things, or going back to things that I know is always fun. Things like the trials, like I said, looking at the evidence and the punishments and the regional differences was just interesting.

I knew about the witch trials, I knew about some of the dynamics that had happened, but you go back and you dig a little bit deeper, and you find new tidbits. It's just interesting. At some point I stop and do the outline and the research concludes, but the most fun part is that preparatory stage.


GR: In this book and a lot of your others, you mention H.P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson. What is it about those two authors? 

SMG: I did my thesis on H.P. Lovecraft, so I know him pretty well. In the case of this book, he's the quintessential New England writer. He's associated a lot with Providence [Rhode Island] and that kind of stuff. And I think for Shirley Jackson, it's the same thing. 

GR: What books are you reading now?

SMG: I just finished reading The Voice of Blood by Gabriela Rábago Palafox. It's the first collection in English of the work of Gabriela Rábago Palafox, who was a short story writer from Mexico, and this is a collection of horror and speculative fiction. She was active in the 1980s, passed away a while ago, and this is the first time she's been translated. 

GR: Your book covers are always so unique and really capture the essence of your stories. How did you approach this one? 

SMG: We often have discussions months before something goes to the artist. For this one, the bird was one of the things that I said we needed to have. At one point we had a cover and there were three arms. Then it became one arm and we also have the bird there. We were worried about the color, that it was a little bit greener, and we were worried that it looked too much like the Wizard of Oz? Those kinds of things we talk about. Right now, I already sent my notes for the cover of my next book.

GR: You do a lot of interviews, and I just wondered what is a question that you wish someone would ask you?

SMG: There was this association between me and H.P. Lovecraft for a really long time. What I really wanted to do in The Bewitching was to try not to evoke Lovecraft but to evoke Shirley Jackson and a different vibe.

I would want to be asked, “How did you hear about Shirley Jackson?” 

The answer is it was The Lottery collection, but it was not The Lottery. The first short story that I read from her, there's a story about a woman that's going to the dentist—I don't remember what it's called—but it's about a woman who's going to the dentist. It starts very mundane. It's just this woman, she has a toothache, and she needs to get a tooth extracted. And it just starts getting weird and weirder. I don't mean anything supernatural happens, but you find yourself thinking, Is this real? Is it not? What kind of space am I inhabiting here? 

Sometimes it's very clearly delineated, like The Exorcist, you know the devil is literally in the room and it's possessing a girl. Then you’ve got other things, like Jackson and the story of the tooth, where you're like, what is happening? This does not feel normal, but neither does it rise to the level of The Exorcist. It just feels sinister in a way that I cannot pinpoint.

The writer that I mentioned, Gabriela Rábago Palafox in The Voice of Blood, she has that vibe all throughout that collection. It's just this sense of did something weird happen? You sometimes finish one of these stories and you're like, nothing weird happened. Did it? Wait a second… But that did not feel also ordinary at the same time. 

Somebody told me once that one of this, I don't know if this is true or not, but that one of the most disturbing experiences that you can have is if you're sitting in a house and the frame of the door is slightly crooked, only by a very small amount of degrees. And that will drive you crazy, and you will not know why. 

I do think there's something to it, and I think stories like the stuff that Shirley Jackson writes, where the door is a little bit tilted to the side, it's extremely disturbing. That sense of the uncanny and the ordinary at the same time. That's some of what I wanted to do with The Bewitching. It had something to do with not only the horror and the witches and all this stuff, but also women and how they navigate their space in their world. 

GR: I love that. And I do have to ask from my own personal curiosity—do you believe in witches?

SMG: I don't.… But I have amulets around the house.