The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/fiction)
“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.”
“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.”
“For contemporary practitioners of Witchcraft, the novel demands wrestling with a complicated history,” Cosette Paneque writes. “These women weren’t claiming the identity of ‘Witch.’ They were sharing knowledge, building community, exercising what small control they could over their precarious lives.”
If I’m lucky, they’ll tell stories of the journeys they take across landscapes as alien as anything in Oz. “I ended up in someone’s garden,” they explain. “Only they were a sort of – scarecrow accordion? I apologized, and they let me cut through their house.” “Why did you need to go through their house?” I ask, and they pause, thoughtful. “Because that was the easiest way to get to you.”