Is Sex a Hex?

Scott reviews Grady Hendrix’s “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.”

By Shannon ScottMarch 1, 2025

• SF

THE PLOT OF Grady Hendrix’s new novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, might be a little surprising to those who have never heard of the best-selling author, although it will likely be familiar territory for his fans. Hendrix specializes in horror, and he has published nine novels in the genre, including How to Sell a Haunted House (2023), My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), and The Final Girl Support Group (2021). He is best known for his campy, action-packed style of horror, which often follows a group of independent-minded women coming together to fight an outside threat—one that is male and/or patriarchal. From Southern women in a book club battling a vampire to aging final girls in a Los Angeles support group contending with a serial killer, Hendrix enjoys presenting a multiplicity of female voices uniting against the forces of evil. In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the heroines comprise a group of pregnant unwed teenagers who have been sent by their families to gestate in the privacy of a “Home” facility called Wellwood House in Florida in 1970. I’m not sure what the collective noun for pregnant teenage girls would be, but after reading this novel, I think it might be something like a hurricane or a contraction, a conjuring or a (bulging) cauldron. This particular cauldron brews up a potent potion of survival, revenge, and sisterhood.

The novel progresses chronologically, following Neva (soon to be renamed Fern) as her disapproving and distant father drives her to Wellwood. However, the novel also works as an epistolary: Neva writes the story looking back on her time as Fern, explaining to the reader (whose identity we later discover) why she did what she did. Once the pregnant teens are ensconced at Wellwood—and given chores and placed on salt restrictions—they’re warned never to share their real names or where they’re from with each other; instead, they’re provided with new names based on Miss Wellwood’s “garden of girls.” If this sounds sweet, it absolutely is not. And neither is Miss Wellwood; she is not a witch, but she is certainly something that rhymes with it. Hendrix does an effective job portraying the vicious judgment these “wayward” girls receive from society, their families, teachers, social workers, doctors, nurses, police officers, and so on. In fact, the best these pregnant teens can expect from authority figures is indifference. And the only people who offer anything other than shame, or who believe the girls have anything to offer other than babies for childless married couples, are witches.

The hypercritical treatment of pregnant teenagers in 1970 is personal for Hendrix. In his acknowledgments, he admits to finding inspiration from two women in his family who were sent to maternity homes. And while Hendrix handles his teenage cast with sensitivity, that is not always true for how he handles witches. For a male author to appropriate stories about female witches, historical or contemporary—and there are many who have, from John Updike to Roald Dahl to Gregory Maguire—should invite close scrutiny. In this novel, the witches veer from being a source of intellectual and physical freedom to a relentless, supernatural threat.

The witchcraft begins with a trip to the bookmobile, where Fern meets the librarian, Miss Parcae, who is also a witch (of course). Miss Parcae, her name derived from the Fates of ancient mythology, hands Fern a book that is more of an instructional manual: How to Be a Groovy Witch by Eth Natas. It’s an anagram for Satan (of course it is), which is where some contemporary witches may take issue with Hendrix, since witchcraft has nothing to do with Satan. It was Christianity, particularly Christian demonologists, that associated Satan with the unfortunate women killed for allegedly practicing witchcraft. Journalist Mona Chollet notes that “between 50,000 and 100,000” were killed internationally during the witch hunts, not counting those who died by suicide or in prison—“whether from the effects of torture or due to the poor conditions of their imprisonment.” It’s a past that Hendrix references but does not dive deeply into as he generally refuses to let historical clouds rain on his horror parade.

Fern decides to become a witch after perusing Miss Parcae’s book on witchcraft. She forms her own coven with three other girls: Holly (the youngest at 14, nonverbal, and wrongly viewed as feebleminded), Zinnia (the only student of color, a piano player, and grossly misinformed about how to use the birth control pill), and Rose (an anti-establishment hippie who wants to keep her baby). These four Nixon-era Hester Prynnes conduct spells, including the “Turnabout,” where they transfer Zinnia’s all-day morning sickness to Dr. Vincent, who has callously claimed that Zinnia’s nausea was all in her head. When the spells work, the girls rejoice and bond, indulging in evenings of revenge and gossip and levitation, but eventually the Devil takes his due—or, in this case, her due, as it’s Miss Parcae (a.k.a. Satan) who crashes the coven as they dance “skyclad” by the river. She offers the girls more power and the ability to make their wishes come true if they sign their names in blood and swear “eternal loyalty and complete obedience” to her.

Miss Parcae is a contrary figure. Her coven, or the women who travel with her and currently reside in the forest near the Home, are more akin to the neo-pagan goddess cults emerging in the 1970s that coincided with second-wave feminism. While this should make Miss Parcae more progressive than, say, Miss Wellwood, who runs the Home, it doesn’t: Glinda the Good Witch she is not. Miss Parcae’s desire for power over others undercuts any liberating message she or her “groovy” book might offer the girls. The notion of Miss Parcae serving as any kind of magical mentor is further challenged by her ultimate goal, which is to use Fern as a vessel for the “line of Hecate” (the spirits of hundreds of dead women over hundreds of years), whether Fern consents to it or not. Miss Parcae also floats the idea of taking Fern’s baby instead to use as a vessel, which is another stereotype about witches the novel could do without.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls intersperses sections of How to Be a Groovy Witch with medical information about the late-term stages of pregnancy, such as when the fetus can open its eyes and when to expect a mucus plug to fall out. This back and forth between witchcraft and pregnancy highlights the novel’s mixed message. While it might seem as though it’s about witchcraft and female empowerment, it’s the power of the female body in its pregnant form that dominates and wins thematically. Fertility, reproduction, and motherhood trump any feminine power that comes from witchcraft, emphasized by the fact that Miss Parcae is a spinster. After assisting with a birth, Fern realizes that biological creation holds the true power for women:

[S]he knew that all the magic the witches had ever done was only a pale imitation of what had happened here tonight.

This was the Great Mystery that lay at the heart of all things. This was the miracle that passed all understanding.

How quickly Fern forgets levitating with her coven under a full moon once she sees a baby’s teensy toesy-woesies.

The birth scenes, and there are four major ones featured in the novel, provide the main tension. Hendrix excels at writing action sequences, and I read the birth scenes in this novel with my jaw and thighs clenched tight, resisting the urge to flip ahead and find out what happens. Although the birth scenarios differ, they’re all horrifying. One birth includes the now (thankfully) outdated method of twilight sleep, in which women would wake up to find their baby born and their vaginas mangled. In this case, it’s a doctor who resorts to an episiotomy for his own ease, then adds “two extra stitches for tightness,” noting that this will help the girl have a happy marriage when she eventually marries, which she of course will. There is also one monstrous birth, literally an abomination, and another harrowing home birth performed by a midwife, Hagar, who is additionally employed as the Home’s cook. Hagar is an intriguing character because she brooks no nonsense about witchcraft yet practices her own form of protective magic involving charms and talismans. As a Black woman in the still often-segregated South, she seems to walk between the worlds in the novel—not in league with Miss Parcae and her hippie coven, not on the side of Miss Wellwood and her staff as they criticize and condemn the girls. Partway through the novel, we shift for a few pages to Hagar’s point of view in order to chronicle the gruesome outcome of a curse against a Wellwood staff member.

It’s not just the action sequences that rely on the female body but also the horror and gore. From mutilation and sacrifice in the name of witchcraft to the multiple graphic birth scenes, the novel provides a cauldron filled to the brim(stone) with womanly blood, sweat, and tears. Additionally, body horror manifests in several instances of hagsploitation, featuring the aging bodies of Miss Wellwood, Miss Parcae, and an old woman called Mags. The grotesqueness of naked elderly female bodies is a popular, if offensive, trope in many recent horror films, including those by Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Andrés Muschietti, where sagging breasts and gray pubic hair are meant to be as stomach-turning as a pair of bloody forceps.

While the horror may stem almost exclusively from women’s bodies, to be fair, this is because men don’t play significant roles in this novel. In fact, there isn’t even a phallic magic wand or pestle to be seen. From Neva’s shame-spiral inducing father to her cowardly boyfriend to the idiotic male ob-gyn, the emphasis is on women and their relationships with each other. In fact, one of the main issues that unites the coven of pregnant teenagers involves the sexual abuse of one of its members that resulted in pregnancy. Hendrix steers clear of graphic sexual violence in his novels, which I appreciate, but he addresses how frequently young women, even when they tell the truth about sexual abuse, are ignored and dismissed, especially in 1970 and especially if the accused has standing in the community or religious authority. Of course, there are references to Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaptation. Rosemary’s Baby underscores the issue of consent that Hendrix considers carefully throughout the text.

It isn’t until the end of the novel that Fern addresses Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, after her stay at Wellwood House. She writes in her memoir: “Less than three years after we left Florida, Roe was decided and the Homes disappeared in the wave of a magic wand.” For many readers, this will likely initiate a more painful kind of cringing than descriptions of cervical dilation, since Roe was overturned in 2022. With the loss of abortion rights in Florida, where Wellwood House is located, and also in Alabama (Fern’s home state), readers might wonder if these Homes will return, except instead of being reserved for teenagers, they would be enforced birth centers for women of all ages. But I believe that horror novel already exists. (Thank you, Margaret Atwood.)

Overall, I enjoyed Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Hendrix’s mixture of humor and horror is a powerful brew. Although some of the false notes about witchcraft and witches left a bad taste, it was not nearly as bad as the calves’ liver milkshake served at Wellwood House.