The Year of the Witching is a very, very good book. It’s unsettling and horrifying, beautiful and incisive, and ultimately, radiantly triumphant. As it centers on a religious dystopia and has feminist themes, it has already been compared to the The Handmaid’s Tale. This is not an inapt comparison; however, I think in tone and setting it reads much more like Nathanial Hawthorne, but as written by a woman living in 2020. In the vein of Hawthorne, it is jam-packed with creepy religious rites, rumoured devil-worship, witchcraft, and a pervasive sense of mounting dread. This book delivers big time on all of the hair-raising quasi-Christian supernatural horror that I need in my life.

The main character of The Year of the Witching, Imanuelle Moore, is a teenager living in Bethel, an isolated society that feels very much like Hawthorne’s vision of Puritan New England but with more explicitly supernatural elements. Also, the religious aspects are even creepier. Immanuelle and her family live on the fringes of Bethelian polite society due to the transgressions of Imanuelle’s mother, who got pregnant out of wedlock and was accused of witchcraft and various other wrongdoings before dying in childbirth. Compounding Imanuelle’s tenuous place in mainstream Bethel is that she is biracial in a society where racist segregation is explicitly justified through religious dogma, and her Black father was burned at the stake for religious crimes.

This book centers around Imanuelle’s role in an unfolding conflict between four powerful, undead witches who live in the mysterious Darkwood that surrounds Bethel, and the religious authorities of Bethel, led by a religious leader with basically unchecked authority called the Prophet. It also tracks Imanuelle’s growing disillusionment with Bethel and its unfettered brutality towards women under the guise of holiness. The Year of the Witching could probably be subtitled Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Being the Feminist Antichrist. 

There are many reasons why this book is amazing. In addition to its explicitly intersectional feminist lens, Imanuelle’s journey as a heroine is particularly satisfying, the world-building is exquisite, the horror elements are off-the-charts spooky, and the prose is gorgeous. There’s even a well-rendered romantic subplot!

At the outset of the book, Imanuelle has settled for living on the margins of society, hoping mostly not to be noticed too much by any of Bethel’s powerful men. She has resignedly accepted not being fully accepted for things outside of her control. When she becomes unintentionally involved in the Witches vs. Church Men conflict, she is mostly afraid of coming under additional scrutiny. As the book goes on, she moves from a place of reactive fear to being an active change agent in Bethel’s crappy society. She becomes someone who proactively works to protect others and right systemic injustices. Her growth throughout the book feels like it flows very naturally from the arc of the plot.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the fact that there is a fairly robust romantic subplot in The Year of the Witching. Imanuelle’s love interest views her as an equal and respects and supports her agency. The sweetness of the romantic element served to help make some of the heavy stuff in this book go down easier.

While I loved Imanuelle’s journey, as someone with a high level of interest in how religions conceptualize and respond to evil and the devil, my favorite thing about this book was the superb world-building, specifically with respect to religion. The enforced religion of Bethel involves worshipping the Holy Father, who is associated with the sun, light, and fire, and reviling the Dark Mother, who is associated with the moon, water, the forest, and witchcraft. Of course, the reviling of the goddess is part of a larger religious system justifying the subjugation and abuse of women wherein women are considered sinful and disgusting while men are just and righteous.

The Bethelian religion is fascinating. Their rites and symbols seem to reference many of the trappings of Christianity, but slightly shifted. For example, the Prophet anoints congregants across the mouth and chin with the blood of sacrificed animals, which they lick away, in a sort of sacrament or communion analogue. Many of the phrases used during worship would not be out of place in a modern Christian church; there is lots of talk of the congregation being a flock and the glory of the Father and his kingdom. The impact of this slight shifting and warping of familiar (familiar to me at least; certainly not for everyone) religious iconography was quite eerie.

Additionally, aspects of Bethelian religion reference abusive situations associated with religion throughout history, like witch trials, burning “heretics” at the state, and the polygamous marriage of very young women to far older men. Other elements of Bethel feel like direct critiques of more recent religious abuses. (In particular, without getting spoiler-y, there is a persistent problem with sexual abuse by those in ecclesiastical authority). With all that said, I would not describe the book as anti-religion overall; it is more so a critique of the way that people with power use religion to justify evil and domination, particularly against women and people of color.

The Year of The Witching is a horror novel above all, and the way different kinds of horror are juxtaposed within the novel is masterful. There are two primary kinds of horror here: first, a more naturalistic, jump-scare, bump-in-the-night kind of horror associated with the Darkwood and the witches who live there. Think being chased, strange noises in the dark, sentient-seeming trees in a forest you can’t escape, corpse-like beings who try to drown you, rivers-run-with-blood kind of horror. Scenes like this:

A great, rippling ring formed at the center of the pond. The waves licked the shore and Imanuelle’s lantern sputtered as if the oil was running low.

In the flickering light, a woman emerged from the shallows. Imanuelle staggered back a half step and raised her lantern. ‘Who’s there?’

This more straightforwardly monster-movie kind of horror (which, to be fair, is legitimately quite scary at points) runs alongside a different strain of horror within the novel, rooted in the evil perpetrated by the men of Bethel against Bethel’s women and girls. As the book goes on, Imanuelle discovers more and more awful things done in secret by “righteous” men. This kind of horror is more psychological and more bone-chilling because it describes things that can (and do) actually happen. The comparison between the monstrous undead witches and the mundanity of abuse in Bethel serves to suggest some interesting ideas about the difference between things that are just scary, and things that are truly evil.

In spite of the gruesomeness of Imanuelle’s world, this book was a joy to read. The prose is strikingly beautiful with rich, poetic description. I was torn between wanting to tear through the chapters as fast as possible to see how things resolved and savoring every sentence. Like this one:

The sun was a hot kiss on the back of Imanuelle’s neck and the air smelled of summer, all sweat and honey and apple blooms.

The whole book is packed with vivid sensory imagery like this.

Readers should be warned that in addition to some gross body-horror elements (mostly blood-related), women (and some men) are abused or threatened with abuse in pretty much every way imaginable in this book. I would say none of it is described particularly graphically and none of it seems gratuitous, but it is nonetheless pretty heavy subject matter to take on as a reader. While this book was amazing and ends in an optimistic way, it was not at all a light read.

I only have two critiques, and they are fairly minor. First, there are moments when Imanuelle’s internal monologue about Bethelian society feel slightly too on-the-nose. For example,

This was the great shame of Bethel: complacency and complicity that was responsible for the deaths of generations of girls. It was the sickness that placed the pride of men before the innocents they were sworn to protect. It was a structure that exploited the weakest among them for the benefit of those born to power.

I think some of this social commentary would be better left as strong subtext instead of text. The message is crystal clear from the plot, and this kind of direct, almost essay-like commentary took me out of the flow of the story slightly. I can tell this book is about the strategies evil men in power use to protect themselves and prey on others without having it said quite so directly.

My other critique is slightly spoiler-y and is related to how the ultimate conflict is resolved:

These are both minor quibbles. Overall, I loved this book. I think it dealt with some heavy themes with a lot of beauty, sensitivity, and compassion. I found it successful as a horror novel, a work of dark speculative fiction, a feminist bildungsroman, and as a scathing critique of the potential evils of hierarchical organized religion. My positive reaction to this book is probably at least somewhat related to the fact that I was raised in a fairly conservative Christian religious tradition and I have truly ambivalent feelings about said religion, and I felt that this book spoke to my ambivalence in a profound and weirdly comforting way. Ambivalent quasi-religious-but-actually-more-spiritual types, unite! And read this book.