THE WAX CHILD, chilling and brutal example of misogyny

THE WAX CHILD
OLGA RAVN (tr. Martin Aitken)
New Directions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.48 ebook, available now

WINNER OF the 2026 Locus Award for TRANSLATED NOVEL!

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 28, 2026

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Based on a real-life seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child tells in vivid prose the story of Christenze Kruckow, a noblewoman long pursued by a scandal of sorcery. People whisper that in her wake one finds illness, death, and unsettling behaviour by pigs and cats. Some even say she once fashioned out of wax a child, an instrument of the most sinister magic. Christenze will flee the rumours to Aalborg, that great city of seawater and mist. But even there suspicion and fear rule, and once a rumour of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove hard to shake…

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My Review: Beginning at about the time this book does, the Lutheran Reformation of Denmark was a bolt from the blue regarding social roles. Women, never favored as a class of beings in christian social organization, had carved out a side-hustles as "cunning folk" or "wise women" whom we would learn to call witches quite soon. Funny, that's part of what the cunning folk were helping their clients protect against..."witch curses lifted one laying hen" or similar verbiage would've been on the cunning folk's roadside signs had they had roadside signs. Or roads.

Author Ravn did a whole huge heap of research on folk magic and its practitioners, relying on court cases and church sources as they are the only extant words about the (mostly) women who worked in this field. This specific story is from court records of Danish women tried and executed for witchcraft.

The creation of a poppet, the European precursor to the voodoo doll (that terrible calumniating lie of a thing), was...faithless to the pop-culture b.s. written and shown for generations now...a bridge created to the intended recipient of health and healing and good fortune.

Once anything gets entangled in the filthy web of christianity it gets perverted and misused.

At all events, Author Ravn used her research heavily in making this story deeply unnerving and spooky. She's created on Christenze's factual bones a story of a woman who simply said "no" to patriarchal control systems, to compulsory heterosexuality, to life spent bearing baby after baby many, even most, of whom will die. Becoming, then, a beacon of sense and independence while attracting to herself a group of like-minded women who resonate to the lures of freedom from "femininity" and its subjugations and humiliations; well, that couldn't be tolerated in the brave new Lutheran world that demanded conformity to its rules and submission to its precepts (as all freshly installed orthodoxies must or face destruction by dissent). Christenze must be stopped, foiled, negated.

Our wax child narrator is created by Christenze prior to her final (dis)solution. The wax child, the poppet, is buried...and survives Christenze. Somehow, not ever vouchsafed us an explanation as to how, we meet the wax child and begin to learn Christenze's story, the story of the communities she inhabited, the story of her downfall...all from the poppet's "mouth" and memory. "How do I know this? The dead fly in the window-sill told me, the grass-pollen as it puffed into the air told me, a brass candlestick told me, a speck of grit. Everything remembers and speaks to those who will listen," we're told.

What elevates this read to all-but five stars is the sharpness of the wax child's awareness of the horrible price we exact, all unthinking, on the whole of creation for our simple continuation of existence as we want, selfishly, it to look. We demand and demand and demand but do not stop to reckon up the cumulation of effects that demanding exacts. "The reason is behind us. All reasons are behind us. The fire has its own reason. The future is already visible. It is over there by the exits. I want you to look directly into the fire—You will hear me in the night under the breath—You will hear me when spring turns to summer, and there in the light an opening occurs...will you come with us to the Lucia fest...? Magic is possible. Laughter is possible. There is a way out...there is a way out…" In this incantatory language, this cadence of a summoning, I want to believe the wax child knows and will vouchsafe.

Way out there might well have been. Might even, for all I know, be. It will not be easy, and it will demand reckoning with the fire. "It is in the depths of her vessels, in that which we call horn and hair. In the smallest sequences it resides there still. I don't need to tell so much, I am merely a reminder, a down that settles upon your brow, and I am with you."

I do not see it coming to pass.

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO, a deeply pleasurable read for my Frontera-raised self

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO
LUIS JARAMILLO
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lawyer and her elderly great-aunt use their supernatural gifts to find a lost child in this richly imagined and empowering story of motherhood, magic, and legacy in the vein of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and La Hacienda.

If you call to the witches, they will come.

1943, El Paso, teenager Nena spends her days caring for the small children of her older sisters, while longing for a life of freedom and adventure. The premonitions and fainting spells she has endured since childhood are getting worse, and Nena worries she’ll end up like the scary old curandera down the street. Nena prays for help, and when the mysterious Sister Benedicta arrives late one night, Nena follows her across the borders of space and time. In colonial Mexico, Nena grows into her power, finding love and learning that magic always comes with a price.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

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My Review: So satisfying. Slow and intricate, deep and wise. I'm sure some will find the woven timelines...no definitive breaks or obtrusive tricks mark the shifts in the timeline...to be deal-breakingly imprecise, but to me that made this like an oral performace of a mythic tale. I will say that, as this is also a review of the book meant to instruct others in its merits, I've nicked a half-star off because this pigeonholes the Perfect Reader a bit overly finely.

I don't always love it when men take it upon themselves to write about motherhood. Author Jaramillo manages to do this feat without making the commonest mistakes men fall into: flattening the narrative scope into a litany of caretaking chores or glossing over these same chores. The effect is the same either end of the spectrum. It makes the work of motherhood into insignificant triviality. I hasten to add that many women writers have done the same, Gone Girl being a notable example. In this book, caretaking, mothering, is literally everywhere and yet this didn't obtrude into my consciousness until I was reviewing my notes before writing this review.

That's well-done prosody...I'm in the sounds of the story not in the structure of it. As these are the sounds of la frontera, where I grew up, I fell right in and did not notice it. Very well done indeed, Author Jaramillo.

I don't think any one thing worked more in favor of the book than Nena's manner of explaining the past to her modern, harried granddaughter, not as a place of beautiful memories but of deeds undine and consequences unmet. Business to be finished dominates every life, none moreso than that of the oldest among us. I resonated like a struck bell to this thread of the tapestry woven for me.

As a way to add some occult flavor and Hispanic culture to your #Deathtober reading, this works very well. As a lovely story of the intense bonds of a loving family woman, forced by bitter circumstance to choose actions permanent and irremediable, making amends as best she can, it's gloriously satisfying.

Read soonest.

THE BOOK OF WITCHING, the kind of horror that keeps me awake

THE BOOK OF WITCHING
C.J. COOKE
Berkley Books
$19.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.

Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

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My Review: The dual-timeline haters are duly warned: this novel uses that technique in an absolutely inescapable way. It's not a gimmick to improve pacing...it's integral to the story, and deployed in a way you invest in right away, or really dislike instantly. It does not change for the entire book so be advised of that if you do not like it on contact.

The initial horror set-up, a mother hearing that her daughter who was off on an adventure holiday is now in the hospital, scared me enough. "It can't get worse than this," thought innocent little me. Your kid's in a burn unit far away. You have to get there, worried out of your mind. Your beloved only child is, when you can finally speak to her, someone else...or so she says. "It can not get worse than this," I shuddered.

Had I but known....

I don't go in for supernatural stories, witches and devils and suchlike silliness. If something supernatural like that existed, I'd've seen it for myself in these past *cough*ty-*mumble* years. Ain't happened. Weird shit, yes; devils and gods and miracles, nope. None of that kind of horror is here, either. It's all the slimy rottenness of Humanity. It's all the horrible stench of misogyny. It's all greed and control at their ugliest and most personal.

Just in somehow linked points in past and present.

That's as far as suspension of disbelief will take me, so I'm glad that's as far as we went. There's nothing but a truly unnervingly described...talisman? power focus?...wisely left ambiguous. If one wants a supernatural explanation for these weirdly entwined events so distant from each other in time, there's a way to see that; there's also nothing that requires it to have that explanation, and the horror in the story told is of human origin.

That made it just right for me to read this #Deathtober, and is why I gave it four stars. I found Clem's anguish and confusion horrifying because they're totally relatable. Her child, a new mother herself, is wounded terribly in body and quite possibly irretrievably in psyche. That could not possibly be worse, except evil Author Cooke made it scarier by introducing elements that are outside normal parameters.

Parents of teens strongly cautioned.

THE WITCHES AT THE END OF THE WORLD, supernatural novel set in wintry, beautiful Norway

THE WITCHES AT THE END OF THE WORLD
CHELSEA IVERSEN
Sourcebooks Landmark
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rage burns brighter than any spellfire...Deep in the birchwoods of Norway, magic courses through the veins of two sisters. For years they've been alone, but sweet-tempered Kaija is tired of living in shadows and longs for a life filled with community, even if it means stifling her magic. But Minna is a witch through and through, with wrath always simmering just below the surface.

Different as they may be, both will never forget the day they were driven from their village. The day their mother burned. When Kaija leaves to pursue a new life, Minna is left alone in the darkness of the forest.

Devastated and outraged at the betrayal, Minna casts a curse to punish those who took everything from her. What she doesn't realize is that this act will incite a deadly chain of events. Soon it will destroy everything, including the life Kaija has lovingly built. But once a witch's rage boils, regret means nothing—she can't take back what's already done.

Someone will have to burn.

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My Review: The nicest surprise of Deathtober's reading. I hadn't read anything by Author Iversen before this, and was expecting a more horror-tinged read...what I got was a revenge story, featuring sisters whose lives were upended by small-minded christian hatemongers. There is definitely a supernatural element to the story. It isn't, however, the kind of all-in horror that ends up with your psyche splattered in gore.

A big part of the reason for that is this is a story that unspools slowly, and in a very interior way. It is almost a récit à deux, a double recit, though such a beast doesn't exist (that I know of). Minna is angry, bitter, and filled with the inexhaustable fuel of contempt for those not as smart as she is. Kaija, on the other hand, is genuinely kind if extremely Other by virtue of who she is and whom she knows best. She is the sister whose path is always set by her desire to see, and be, the best it's possible to, in herself and others. Her decision to return to their home village where their mother was burned alive as a witch causes Minna to react violently She casts a curse on the whole village. Her rage can never be extinguished, but can be thrust outward to burn others.

The reason the book appealed to me is probably the reason some found it frustrating. I liked the slower pace that the author chose, as it left more time for me to get to feel the sisters' differences of character. The third-person narration, told in short chapters alternating between the sisters, was spangled with lovely sentences that use Norwegian terms, that unfold into images of the birch woods and the village, in three mental dimensions. Shadows and light are lovely almost characters.

The Norse "pagan" craft is wonderfully used, with figures from the Norse mythos making their presences known without coming across as intrusions into Reality by pagan gods...they feel like characters whose names we happen to know. The worldbuilding is thus made that much more enjoyable for a twenty-first century atheist. The way that Kaija, the elder sister, yearns for life in the village as a christian wife and a mother did not sit well with me...selling herself short and out to be average, when she could be a Power? Not the kind of message I'd choose to send. But Minna's rageful reponse to her sister's absconding, while understandable, skates perilously close to Evil. The author was very wise to be sure we know that Minna's curse is not the cause of Kaija's different life challenges. That made what could've been unpleasant horror into not-entirely-pleasant, deeply thought through, supernatural fiction.

Set at the crossroads where Norway had to choose between its old, established supernatural beliefs and the newfangled ways of the christian church in a lasting, final way, this story of sisters whose choices define the stakes, and the costs, of each course is one I think is ideal for anyone on your Yule list who loves immersive reads. Investing the time to be in this world with Kaija and Minna is easiest to make happen now that the nights are long and the winds are cold. It was a pleasure to meet Author Iversen. I would commend Minna, and Kaija (though less so), to your long nights of deep reading.