Ask a Bookseller: ‘Witchcraft for Wayward Girls’ by Grady Hendrix

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Coco Casey of Buxton Books in Charleston, S.C., recommends a favorite author local to her store: horror master Grady Hendrix. His novel, “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls,” is out in paperback. The novel follows a group of pregnant teenage girls in a maternity home who discover a spell book that pulls them into the world of witchcraft and the supernatural. The horror in this book, however, lies in the girls’ real-life situation, which is historically based. The book is set in what’s called the Baby Scoop Era, from the 1940s to 1973, before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal and Title IX protected pregnant students from discrimination. The girls were brought to his home to hide their pregnancies; they were given false names and strictly monitored, with the expectation that their babies would be given up for adoption. "In a world where they have very little control over their own bodies and their own fates, they are given this tool to have control in other realms that they didn't know was possible before,” Casey says. She says this novel, set in 1970, is “on the lower end of fear factor” for Hendrix’s books, though there is body horror, and the birth scenes are not for the faint-of-heart. She calls the books’ antagonists well-written and “very scary,” mostly because such situations exist.Casey recommends reading the afterward as well. "The afterword and the notes are fascinating. He did a lot of research into covens and their lineages, into the medical side of these stories, and into the legal side of these stories. And it's very hard to find accurate historical research for a lot of this, because the point of these homes was that there was no documentation and that it was all buried.”