Witches are the new vampires. For this reader, it’s a welcome shift on the Gothic Romance-o-meter. Among vampires, we have had, of course, the depressingly influential teen melodrama of the Twilight series on the one hand, and on the other, adhering more to the Zombie Horde School, the apocalyptic nail-biting of Justin Cronin’s The Passage.
By comparison, if early indications mean anything, witches belong to a more nuanced class. On the poppier end of the spectrum, there is the blockbuster of the moment, Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches. But if you’re looking for a subtler way in to the new wave of witch, the far more satisfying discovery would be Sheri Holman’s Witches on the Road Tonight.
Holman, though sporadically bestselling and generally well reviewed, is among the most deserving American novelists for promotion to the A-list. Her previous works are admirably wide-ranging in their subject matter and time periods, including the superbly Dickensian The Dress Lodger and the post-boom Americana of The Mammoth Cheese. She is a writer clearly fascinated by the fictional possibilities of history (as opposed to the more unfortunately common teaching of history through fiction), and Witches on the Road Tonight, her fourth novel, is even more ambitious on this count, jumping between pre-Second World War Appalachia and present-day New York (among other stops).
Yet it isn’t her intriguing approach to the past that is most rewarding about reading Sheri Holman, but the distinctive sentences she uses to bring that past to idiosyncratic life. Sentences such as the following, which come early on, and stand as a declaration of the author’s understanding of “the need to terrify, followed by the even greater need to puncture the fear we’ve called into being. It is a surrender and recovery that feels suspiciously like love.”
Love and fear are the fuels that fire Witches’ engine, though they are both of the winningly off-kilter variety. The underlying story involves Tucker Hayes, a twenty-something Southerner squeezing the juice out of his last few days of freedom before reporting to Fort Dix in the lead-up to the Second World War. Tucker is travelling through the Appalachian backlands when his car strikes an 11-year-old boy, Eddie, whose mother, Cora, is reputed to come from a long line of witches living in the mountain thickets of Panther Gap.
Eddie survives (and goes on to a career as Captain Casket, a campy TV horror show host in the 1970s), but Tucker’s fate is a foggier business: Once he becomes Cora’s lover, does he stay on with her in the mountains to dodge the draft, or is he literally devoured by her wild passions and animal transformations? Or, in a larger sense, are local myths just reheated fictions passed down from generation to generation, or are magic, and evil, literal facts of American life?
Back to Eddie. When we meet him in present-day Manhattan, he is dying of cancer and reaching out to his daughter, Wallis, a 24-hour news channel anchor and, possibly, the carrier of some of granny’s witch blood. What we know for sure is that these two have a secret, a nasty one, regarding Jasper, an orphan whom Eddie and his wife adopted when Wallis was a child. Jasper was a devout Captain Casket fan, which was creepy enough. But when his adoration of his adoptive father became suggestive of deeper longings (and deeper knowledge), he set his own path, as well as Wallis’s and Eddie’s, back to Panther Gap. There, they search for the possibly long dead, or possibly still living, Tucker, but find tragedy instead.
If this all sounds a bit silly – Appalachian witches? disappeared lovers? Captain Casket? – it doesn’t read that way on the page. There is humour in Holman’s prose, and intelligent ironies, but no camp, no ghoulish excess. Witches is a serious novel about America’s relationship with – and arguable reliance upon – homegrown mythologies: horror B-movies, the cabin in the woods, Southern black magic and, yes, witches. For readers who likes their trendy monsters delivered in wise and sensual lines, and with a side order of cultural insight, Witches on the Road Tonight beats the vampires hands down.
Andrew Pyper’s latest novel is The Guardians.
