The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/category/features/arts-culture)
“A story set in Near becomes a mirror,” writes Beatrix Kondo, exploring folklore, fear, and the familiar stranger in V.E. Schwab’s novel “The Near Witch.” “What the mirror reflects is a community organized around the strategic management of its own fear.”
In 2020, Lauren Parker was driving through the desert listening to David Bowie’s 1976 album “Station to Station,” starring one of Bowie’s most haunting characters, the Thin White Duke. “I didn’t even know if I liked the album,” she writes. “I just couldn’t shake it.”
“Contemporary reclamations of ‘witch’ as feminist identity tend toward celebration,” writes Beatrix Kondo, “which Atwood declines. What she offers instead is something harder and more useful: these practices functioned as survival apparatus for populations the official world refused to protect.”
“Something that awestruck me is the wide variety of languages in this record,” writes Alan U. Dalul, “including German, English, Latin, Greek, Hungarian, and more. We are in deep need of diversity, of union, which this record celebrates through language and heritage.”
“We have no record from Hypatia about the circumstances of her life,” writes Meg Elison in her review of the 2009 film about the ancient Roman philosoher. “Letters written to her by men are preserved; none of her letters to them remain.”
“If you’re drawn to folkloric density, ancestral memory, visceral horror that rejects comfort, or animist logic where houses and bodies blur,” writes Cosette Paneque in her review of Irene Solà’s novel, “this has power. But know what you’re walking into.”
