Witchcraft for Wayward Girls casts a spell.

Grady Hendrix's novels are cleverly marketed. Whether it's all him (and if you've seen him speak, you'd know it very well could be) or his publisher, his books have eye-catching, almost humorous titles that draw the prospective reader in, usually with cleverly designed covers to match them. From The Southern Girls Guide to Slaying Vampires and My Best Friend's Exorcism to The Final Girl Support Group, the packaging almost suggests the reader is in for a tongue-in-cheek ride more along the lines of a Christopher Moore novel instead of a Stephen King tale, and while there is humor in his novels, the smart marketing belies the fact that most of his books are straight up horror stories, sometimes pretty damn spooky, oftentimes really brutal. His latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, has little to offer in the way of humor but is a smart, tragic, and at times shocking deep dive into the patriarchal culture of the 1970s South, the callous, dehumanizing shaming of unwed teen mothers, and yes, a pretty damn good horror story.

The book centers on the Wellwood House, a maternity home for unwed mothers in Florida, a place where, for a price, "disgraced" families can hide their daughters away during their pregnancies and have their babies, which will be given to "proper" families, the promise being, that, once they have their babies, they can go home and live out their lives like none of it ever happened.

Fern (not her real name, all the girls at Wellwood are given the name of flowers) is unceremoniously left by her father, and thrown into Wellwood with a motley crew of other "wayward girls" - Rose, Holly, Zinnia, and others, the cast at Wellwood is ever revolving, and the foundation of the novel is a cruel and unfair society, a searing indictment of patriarchal culture and how it treats its young girls. For that is what the young ladies at Wellwood are, some of them barely in their teens, the girls at Wellwood are all still practically children - young, scared, and ashamed, living under the firm hand of Miss Wellwood, a cold disciplinarian only too happy to shame the girls every chance she gets.

The plot thickens when the girls discover a coven of witches living in the nearby woods, led by the enigmatic Miss Parcae, who moonlights (or daylights, I suppose) as the bookmobile librarian. She gives the girls a book of spells, opening the door of witchcraft to our wayward girls, perhaps making possible, for the first time in their lives, to exert influence over their own destinies. All with a price, of course.

Hendrix deftly crafts unique personalities for each of his girls in an environment in which the girls are not supposed to have identities of their own. In their society, they are young women defined by their mistakes, and Hendrix delves deep into the girl's psyches. Some of them are at Wellwood because of a relationship, some are there because of abuse and rape, all of them are there because society views them and their babies as property. There's a lot of not-so-subtle social commentary here, especially when the way the girls are forced to live at Wellwood is contrasted with the coven in the woods. Some of the girls, Fern being one of them, seem to accept the fact that she's at Wellwood is her fault, that she's there for her own good, only to question this the more they learn about magic.

The witchy elements of the plot flirt with familiar tropes: everything comes with a price, tampering with witchcraft has dark consequences, etc., but Hendrix (thankfully) avoids the typical puritanical justice that is meted out to young girls in horror stories, especially those who get out of line and tamper with black magic. He never loses sight of the fact that the girls at Wellwood are his heroines and Miss Parcae and her coven, while certainly serving in an antagonistic role in the story, are more of a contrast with the world from which the girls come - these are women who have left society behind to take control of their own destinies.

There are plenty of spooky moments in the book, Hendrix is at the top of his game with some of the ghostly, witchy encounters, but the scenes depicting childbirth are brutal and horrific, hard to read even for someone like me who devours a lot of horror. I've never experienced childbirth, and neither has Hendrix, but you wouldn't know that from these passages. They lay bare his thesis that these girls are viewed by Wellwood house as baby makers for the families that are going to take them.

The climax of the novel is less of a battle between good and evil and right and wrong,

but a contrast in choices, and Hendrix gives us both happy endings and tragic ends for some of our characters. Like any good work of horror fiction, you can read this as a straight horror tale, or you can delve deeper under the skin of the novel and the mirror it is casting on society. I did a little bit of both.