The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's most recent novel (though she does have another coming out in July), The Bewitching, was released in July of 2025. It is Moreno-Garcia's eleventh full length novel, and she also has a handful of novellas and collections of short stories. The Bewitching is a National Bestseller, an Amazon Editor's Pick for Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and was voted one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal, among others. It deals with animal death, toxic relationships, adult/minor relationship, bullying, sexual assault, grief, stalking, car accidents, murder, and injury.

Minerva grew up on her Nana Alba's stories of the supernatural, perhaps that is why she loves horror novels and tales of the gothic or macabre. While in graduate school, she decides to focus her dissertation on a relatively obscure horror author, Beatrice Tremblay (Lovecraft and Poe are so overdone), who happened to attend the same university so she has access to some of Tremblay's personal letters and journals. It becomes clear to Minerva that Beatrice based her most famous novel on the disappearance of her college roommate. The roommate was never found. The deeper Minerva gets into Beatrice's memories of her roommate, the stranger and more terrifying her own life becomes until she begins to believe that Nana Alba's stories were more than just fiction.

I was really excited about this book. The cover really drew me in. There are three POVs - Minerva's story takes place in the present while we uncover Beatrice's story through pieces of her journal that Minerva studies. We also get to see what happened to Alba when she was a girl, that lead to the stories she told Minerva. And there are really two plot lines, what happened to Alba and what happened to Beatrice's roommate which converge at the end in a way I did enjoy. I felt uncomfortable and on edge for the majority of the book, which is exactly what I'm looking for in a horror novel. But I felt like the story lacked depth. As the reader, I felt aloof and disconnected from the story. Because of that, I had a hard time connecting to the characters in any meaningful way. It left me unsatisfied.

I'm giving The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 3.5 stars out of 5. It wasn't bad, but I wish it felt less distant than it did. I did like the bit of ambiguity at the end though.

For more from the author, check out https://silviamoreno-garcia.com/

Pairs well with a fried bologna sandwich and owning a mancerina for hot chocolate.

My favorite quote: "The stories contradicted one another as all good oral narratives must."