The Heart Is a Lonely Haunter

Chelsea Davis hangs out with dead people in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “The Bewitching.”

By Chelsea DavisJuly 25, 2025

• SF

THE NICE THING about hanging out with dead people is that they don’t try to get to know you. Ask a coroner, ask a medium, ask an academic. We don’t always think of that last profession as trading in death, but academics often spend quite a bit of time with the deceased—with their writing, their ideas. Indeed, scholars can eventually come to “know every detail about someone, their every word and thought,” explains Minerva, the graduate student at the center of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new novel, The Bewitching. But crucially, in Minerva’s view, that someone can’t ask your thoughts in return. It’s a one-way phone line, routed straight up from six feet under.

Minerva admits that her intense commitment to her research subjects “makes it harder to notice people in the real world.” Granted, she doesn’t seem especially interested in the living to begin with. Minerva is both prickly by nature and separated from those around her by the chasm of privilege: she’s a Mexican scholarship kid at a private Massachusetts college whose student body chiefly comprises spoiled, white coeds. Hence, Minerva feels most at ease in the archives or the stacks, exhuming the late authors and fictional characters of weird fiction. She has exactly one friend—Hideo, a fellow international graduate student whose main narrative function is to drag Minerva to parties she does not enjoy—and avoids romantic prospects like the devil.

But who needs sex when you’ve got books? Minerva’s emotional connection to the dead authors she studies is so hot-blooded it verges on the erotic. When a skeptical undergraduate asks her why she bothers slaving away at a thesis about people she’ll never meet, and which few will ever read, Minerva rhapsodizes about “the romance of [scholarship]. It’s as if you’re conducting a secret, passionate love affair. […] When you look at their writing, you swoon over a sentence fragment or a turn of phrase. It’s as if, through the mists of time, someone reaches out and touches your hand.”

That final image of a phantom hand is rich with resonance in the horror genre. It hearkens back, for instance, to one of the eerier scenes from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Spooked by the sound of voices late at night, the book’s main character, Eleanor, anxiously clutches what she believes to be her friend Theo’s hand, only to realize that Theo is sitting clear across the room. “God God—whose hand was I holding?” Eleanor whispers. More recently, in the film Talk to Me (2022), grief-stricken teen Mia communes with the dead by essentially arm-wrestling a mummified hand, a desperate, close embrace that soon makes her vulnerable to a very bad ghost. In both cases, the disembodied hand gives metaphoric form to the dire loneliness of the character in question. An outstretched hand would seem a universal gesture of warm, human connection—but connection can be dangerous, depending on whom or what you’re making contact with.

Likewise with Minerva. Just a few pages after using hand-holding as a simile for transhistorical intimacy, she is grabbed by an actual hand while walking around campus at night. “A hand settle[s] on her shoulder and she let[s] out a hoarse cry” and falls to the ground. It’s left ambiguous whether the offending hand belongs to a douchey guy from her dorm, or to a witch; both have been harassing Minerva lately. In either case, though, the attack confirms Minerva’s belief that to be touched in the realm of fantasy is sublime, while to be touched in real life is a violence.

The Bewitching is far from the first campus novel to paint scholars as inveterate loners and longers. It’s a characterization that has always struck me as a bit disingenuous. Sure, research and writing often require solitude. Yet academia has many inescapably social elements as well. Graduate students and professors alike must teach and advise, hobnob at conferences and at departmental meetings, get drunk with their cohort or dine out with their colleagues. But Moreno-Garcia cleverly avoids staging these challenges to Minerva’s solitude by setting The Bewitching on a college campus between June and August, a period when most social obligations vanish along with the undergraduates. School is actually a pretty nice place to spend the summer if you’re a hermit. Minerva’s go-to hangout spot can be the archive, her main squeeze a long-dead writer.

Moreno-Garcia’s fiction very often stars misanthropes who prefer the idealism of parasocial relationships to the tedium and danger of real ones. In Velvet Was the Night (2021), Maite uses the vicarious thrills of comic books to escape her lackluster social life; Silver Nitrate’s (2023) Montserrat is only really happy when she’s watching or discussing old films; and the three teenage outcasts of Signal to Noise (2015) rely on a steady IV drip of soap operas, romance novels, and music to survive high school. Other protagonists (like those of 2020’s Untamed Shore and 2019’s Gods of Jade and Shadow) are would-be cosmopolitans stuck in the countryside, daydreaming about ditching their hillbilly suitors for gentlemen in the big city. Put otherwise, Moreno-Garcia’s great subject is yearning—across distance, time, and planes of reality.

The other core characters in The Bewitching also do a lot of yearning. The novel’s point of view is occasionally handed over to Minerva’s great-grandmother, Alba, who resents her “provincial life” in rural Mexico and fantasizes about escaping to Mexico City, where she could shack up with a “mature, sophisticated, and intelligent man” who reads poetry and speaks French. Other chapters are told from the perspective of Beatrice “Betty” Tremblay, a forgotten horror author from the 1930s who is the focus of Minerva’s thesis. Betty loves ghost stories and occasionally partakes in Spiritualist rituals with her friend Ginny, who “believed in communion with the departed and found comfort in her [automatic] writing and her sketches, which were supposedly influenced by invisible hands.” It would seem, however, that their desperation to live in worlds beyond their own makes these characters more susceptible to the more vicious entities that inhabit those other realms. In time, Alba, Ginny, and Minerva are each beset by the eponymous bewitching, a dark force that wealthy families have been wielding to consolidate power for centuries.

In Moreno-Garcia’s rendering, which blends Mexican teyolloquani witch lore with elements of the Spiritualist and Puritan supernatural, a bewitching is a form of obsessive, unwanted attention. Those targeted by witches feel “a burning, insistent gaze fixed on” them whenever they’re alone; they’re plagued by weird noises whenever they seek quiet; and their homes are invaded by animals. It’s like getting gang-stalked by ghouls. This would upset anyone, but you can imagine how it might present a special kind of nightmare for an introvert. In fact, horribly, being hounded by a teyolloquani eventually turns the victim further inward because they have witnessed a tear in reality that no one else around them can see. They soon alienate the few friends they do have with paranoid rants about “men who followed [them], men who paced below windows.” Even Betty, who loves her friend Ginny with sapphic abandon, confesses that, “in the end, [she] left [Ginny] to face that terrible, hungry darkness on her own.”

Happily, Minerva possesses the combination of old family lore and modern research skills necessary to defeat the supernatural nasties that also plagued Ginny and Alba. This is pretty much par for the course for a work of dark academia, in which knowledge is the most obvious defense against the dark arts. But what’s more surprising about The Bewitching—delightfully so—is that the book ultimately demands no real personal growth of its main protagonist. Minerva learns a lot but changes little over the course of the story.

A more conventional novel would have forced its wallflower to blossom socially. At least one of the colorful characters Minerva meets over the course of her research might have stuck around to become a friend or a lover: Conrad, a student with whom Minerva has a mutual attraction; Benjamin, a kindly old friend of Betty Tremblay’s; Carolyn, the grand dame who owns many of Betty’s papers; Noah, Carolyn’s chatty grandson. Moreno-Garcia even tosses a red herring in this direction early on, when Minerva observes that, “rather than being an old, scared man hiding inside a dilapidated mansion,” as stereotype would have it, weird fiction granddaddy H. P. Lovecraft did, in fact, “have a social life.” I had worried that Moreno-Garcia would impose the same compulsory extroversion on Minerva.

But instead, the living people whom our main character meets ultimately turn out to be fleeting acquaintances at best and actual antagonists at worst. (Like, the kind who try to ritually murder you.) Nor has Minerva’s one study buddy, Hideo, managed to really worm his way into her heart by the time of the novel’s denouement. The physical and psychic scars that Minerva accrues during her showdown with the head witch would have served a less guarded character as an opportunity to share her brutal experiences with a friend, but Minerva decides, rather, that “she couldn’t explain what had really taken place and instead accepted [Hideo’s] attention in silence.”

“Isolation is not going to allow you to craft a more brilliant thesis,” Hideo warns Minerva at the beginning of the summer. But he turns out to be dead wrong. The novel concludes in mid-autumn, with Minerva every bit as socially cocooned as she was when the novel began. She etches witch marks into her house’s front door, a safeguard against occult attackers, which can’t help but feel like a KEEP OUT! warning to would-be human guests too. She doesn’t have time for visitors of either sort anyway. The writer’s block that was jamming up the works at the beginning of the summer has now unstuck itself, and Minerva is “feverishly at work” on her Betty Tremblay project, “the piles of notes multiplying.”

While she may be no closer to the living by the novel’s end, Minerva’s connection to her imagined community of dead witch-seers (Ginny and Betty) has only deepened. She has now experienced the same supernatural ordeal that they did, after all. Indeed, she plans to carry out a kind of resurrection via recuperative criticism: “With some luck, it wouldn’t be only Betty who would be rescued from the jaws of oblivion; Ginny’s art might also gain recognition” through Minerva’s thesis. The young scholar has also forged a stronger tie to her own late great-grandmother, having now lived the truth behind Nana Alba’s initially dubious claim that “back then, when [she] was a young woman, there were still witches.”

The final page of The Bewitching poetically enters Minerva into a long lineage of scholars, alone together, each “marching through their own esoteric labyrinths of learning.” It’s frankly a relief to encounter a novel that so fully honors the aliveness of the past, and the right of lone wolves to stay lonely.